
Thread beginning with comment 286559
by Hiev on Sun 25th Nov 2007 00:45 UTC
Member since:

Because of this, trying to implement OOXML is pointless.

There is a 99.99% other programs like Qt, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc. will implement it, you want it or not.

Saying is pointless is saying the same of the other projects, so lets waith and see how everyone else implements it and see how pintless it gets.

Of course, the fact that OOXML is implemented for compatiblity reasons doesn't mean it is worthy as standar.

Reply Score: 1

RE: ...
by aseigo on Sun 25th Nov 2007 01:11 in reply to "..."
aseigo Member since:

yes, there is a very real difference between implementing a spec and being a part of the standardization process.

sadly, Jody will likely only be a bystander in that process anyways as it is doubtful Microsoft will allow meaningful involvement beyond what helps their own self interests (e.g. allowing just enough input to be able to point and say "hey, see, others are involved too, just like a real standard!").

i understand why Jody and the GNOME Foundation are doing what they are doing, however i also think it's a bit on the naive side of hopefulness and certainly sends the wrong message to the world.

one can certainly implement standards without being involved in their creation. sometimes that's precisely what one needs to do.

when looking for cues as to when to do that, it may be useful to look at what your friends, allies and trusted colleagues are doing.

Reply Parent Score: 20

RE[2]: ...
by jdub on Mon 26th Nov 2007 12:32 in reply to "RE: ..."
jdub Member since:

Aaron, we were not involved in OOXML's creation, nor are we contributing to it becoming an ISO standard. Microsoft dumped the spec on ECMA, Jody has been pushing them hard to release relevant documentation for as much of it as he can.

That has actually been of material benefit to the fight against OOXML in ISO, given that Jody has blown out the OOXML specification size pretty well. :-)

Reply Parent Score: 5

RE: ...
by apoclypse on Sun 25th Nov 2007 01:19 in reply to "..."
apoclypse Member since:

The problem is not in the implementation but in the collaboration. What he was trying to say was that at the end of the day ooxml is an MS office format and that the format will most likely primarily cater to MS office as opposed to being something that all projects can give input on. Even if the format were accepted as an open standard only one implementation really matters, and thats Microsoft's. If every other office suite were to implement the standard to the letter but MS doesn't then the standard is not a standard because all anyone is going to care about is how MS implements the standard, thus MS's version of ooxml (eventhough they wrote this one)is the defacto standard not the one held by the ECMA. Kind of like the Renderman spec. Pixar released a standard spec of their Renderman platform hoping that other rendering systems would implement them, yet Pixar themselves have added things that go beyond the spec (they do update it eventually but note that not all things have to be implemented in-order to be called renderman compatible, but what use is that?) at the end of the day the only "standard" people adhere to is the implementation (product) that Pixar has released and very little focus on the actual standard specification that is released.

What exactly does that mean? It means that the OSS community will always be playing catch-up with MS, Any office suite that implements ooxml will always be one step behind MS, because they have to be compatible with MS's version of ooxml not the one released by the ECMA. The problem is that the ooxml standard actually allows this. ODF was created without MS but that was MS's own fault (or plan?) they did not want to get involved in the standardization of the format, but MS wasn't the only being asked, it wasn't just one company but many all agreeing on the standard, and to adhere to it in varying degrees (if I'm not mistaken, with ODf you can always implement less but not more to the format). That in my opinion is what makes ooxml so dangerous. Its not really a standard that anyone will adhere to and it ill put us back into the same situation we are already in where huge amounts of data is at the mercy of one company with everyone else trying to follow with their half-ass implementations trying to grab stray users who don't want to be tied down.

The biggest example I can think of in the OSS community is Mono. If Mono isn't a poster child for why you shouldn't follow a MS "standard" then I don't know what is. At the beginning Mono was just implementing the standard ECMA version of .Net, then MS releases a whole bunch of things to .net outside of the ecma standard. The devs have to re-implement these things into Mono. It doens't matter that most of these things aren't part of the ecma standard, people expect them because they are standard (on an MS platform) and so Mono has to constantly go sniffing MS's ass trying to re-implement everythign they have added to the platform that are outside of the standard (asp,net, winforms, etc.) That will most likely happen with ooxml.

Edited 2007-11-25 01:22

Reply Parent Score: 24

RE[2]: ...
by wakeupneo on Sun 25th Nov 2007 02:34 in reply to "RE: ..."
wakeupneo Member since:

Spot on.

Reply Parent Score: 2