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Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975Posted Apr 17, 2012 5:13 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 by dlang Parent article: Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities
but it's easy to define a format with 100% backwards compatibility on paper. Sure. That's why I'm talking about real world documents (mostly financial), not about some abstract paper. and it would be about as much use as the OOXML format in terms of actually allowing anyone to implement it It'll be much harder to implement it even partially, but yes, you'll achieve compatibility goal. ODF have not done it and thus it's not compatible. It's as simple as that. your repeated claims that OOXML has achieved success only work if you completely ignore all technical measures of success Bullshit. I've given you a criteria: take a bunch of old documents from some collection (private and/or government one), convert them to ODF and OOXML, convert them back, watch the result. This is technical criteria (it was guiding policy for Unicode standard BTW, only there they converted plain text documents in different encodings back and forth). OOXML works (as implemented by MS Office), ODF fails (as implemented by LibreOffice). Most of the failures are caused exactly by refusal of ODF to support legacy warts which you so despise.
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Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 18, 2012 21:15 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] For a fair comparison, convert StarOffice documents to ODx and back, not MSFT cruft. And BTW, the "conversion" there is mostly wrapping/unwrapping, there is no real "conversion." Or use Office to convert from DOC to ODT and back.
Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 18, 2012 22:03 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] For a fair comparison, convert StarOffice documents to ODx and back, not MSFT cruft. I don't know where your idea about “fair” comes from. There are bazillion documents created in the format of old versions of MS Office. Number of documents in StarOffice format is minuscule in comparison. That's why OOXML was designed and presented as format usable and compatible with “old proprietary formats of MS Office”, not with “old proprietary formats of all existing programs”. This is how it was presented in ISO and this is what said format does. If ISO accepted this goal as design criteria (and looks like it did) then indeed OOXML is the best possible solution. And BTW, the "conversion" there is mostly wrapping/unwrapping, there is no real "conversion." Sure, but it works. Not perfectly, but much better then ODT. Or use Office to convert from DOC to ODT and back. The results are usually significantly worse then with LibreOffice. That's because when LibreOffice is faced with something unsupported by ODF (but supported by old, proprietary formats) it tries to somehow change the document to fit. MS Office just drops these parts on the floor. And it'a easy to understand why: LibreOffice has no choice while MS Office has much better format (better for the purpose of editing old documents, that is): OOXML.
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