John Meyer wrote:
Harold Fuchs wrote:
Slightly off topic but of interest, I think. Sorry if it's old news -
I've
been away.
Okay, forgive me for being the idjit on this one, but given
Microsoft's proprietary nature, why in the world would it want to make
OOXML an "open standard"? As one poster put it on that blog, all of
Microsoft's other formats have become more or less de facto and they
haven't been opened up.
And as far as the "competing on standards", that's like saying you're
going to compete on languages to my thinking.
Portions of the OOXML standard from MS call for the insertion of binary
data in proprietary MS formats. For example, windows meta-files. So,
full support of OOXML can only be done by MS. The ODF also has binary
data, but this is always in standard formats such as JPG and PNG.
Portions of the standard say things such as "Implement this as though it
came from a Word document", without indicating what the behavior should
be. Not acceptable.
If OOXML is adopted, this is a big win for MS, because their standard is
very complicated and so even if I wanted to implement the standard, it
would take at least a year to do so. The OOXML standard looks more like
MS came up with something that worked in Office 2007 and then said
"Yeah, the output from Office 2007, that is the standard." If they had
done that, at least it would not have contained errors.
The end game for MS is that they want people to adopt their standard,
which would allow a government to dictate that a standard be used for
data storage, and still have vendor lock-in.
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
My Book: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
See Also: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/index.html
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