On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Jürgen Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > The OpenDocument format (ODF) which has it's roots in OpenOffice is a > good thing and it helped a lot that office productivity becomes a little > bit more transparent and a step forward to become vendor independent. > Ideally one standard would have been used and would evolve over time to > address new requirements, features etc. > > We all know that the reality is different and we have today 2 open > standards for more or less the same thing, at least from my point of view. > > We have ODF which is an OASIS and ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006), see > [1] and [2]. And we have OOXML which is an Ecma and ISO standard > (ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008), see [3] and [4]. > > We can now argue why do we have 2 standards and can discuss the pros and > cons. But does it help? I don't think so and I believe we have to live > with the current situation. > > But this means that we have to take into account that OOXML is an > important file format that becomes more and more important over time. > And that we should think about a strategy to support this format better > in AOO. > > We see growing demand for better interoperability with OOXML and I > believe we can't ignore this anymore. We have OOXML import which have to > be improved and we don't have an export yet. I think it was a strategic > decision from Sun/Oracle to focus on an import only. I believe the goal > was to push ODF and an ODF eco system which was not a bad idea. But > again the reality seems to be different today and the demand for OOXML > is growing. > > That is the reason why we will start to investigate in a better OOXML > support for AOO and you will probably notice some more activity in the > future going in this direction. We have already started to analyze what > we have and how we can push things forward. One thing is of course the > missing export and the other thing an improved import. For the import we > are thinking about a bigger change to consolidate 3 different approaches > in 3 applications that we have today and we plan to start a new > framework. Something cleaner and better structured as what we have today > and that will give us further opportunities to use it for analyzing of > documents and used features, tracking of our coverage and in the end to > become more efficient. >
An idea: Maybe we can start collecting links and resources related to OOXML support in AOO on this wiki page: http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Xml ??? -Rob > Of course this does not mean that we support ODF any less. We remain > strong supporters of ODF and aim to be the reference implementation for > the standard. AOO committers like Regina, Oliver and Rob work directly > on the ODF standard in OASIS. > And it is not really about choosing one standard over another. The point > is to preserve the MS interop capabilities that OOo always had, and > update it to work with the latest formats used by MSO. > > Anyway this will be a major task but I believe a necessary and important > one for AOO to continue to be the best free open source office suite. > > > Juergen > > > [1] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office > > [2] > http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43485 > > [3] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm > > [4] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=51463 > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
