Opera CTO Hits Back at Microsoft's Standards Push

Michael writes "Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie hit back today at Microsoft's push to fast track Office Open XML into an ISO standard, in a blistering article on CNET. He also took a swipe at Open Document Format: 'I'm no fan of either specification. Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them. If forced to choose one, I'd pick the 700-page specification (ODF) over the 6,000-page specification (OOXML). But I think there is a better way.' The better way being the existing universally understood standards of HTML and CSS. Putting this to the test, Håkon has published a book using HTML and CSS."

Yes. Well...

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie sort of "bitch slapped" a picture of Bill Gates and splashed some white wine around...

Ok... Cheese, anyone?

fsck'n ugly

Yeah, but that "book" is fsck'n ugly. It doesn't even compare to a professionally typeset book, or something produced in LaTeX. I hope that isn't the "solution" to this standards "problem". Let's face it, the average Joe is going to use whatever Microsoft pushes at them. Case closed.

Re:fsck'n ugly

Yeah, but that "book" is fsck'n ugly. It doesn't even compare to a professionally typeset book, or something produced in LaTeX.

You don't typeset with Microsoft Word, either. Which makes the entire argument specious. Word processors like MS Word and OOo Writer are for creating common documents like letters, memos, and maybe the occasional flyer. Neither one is particularly good at anything even close to professional publishing work. Even the book authors just use Word (or surprisingly, OOo Writer!) to do the text content. That text is then exported to a more sophisticated program, where the actual typesetting and page layouts are done.

I think this fellow's point is that HTML/CSS formats can store any information that a Word Processor might need to store, with no need to invoke new technologies. To a certain extent, he may be correct. Unfortunately, HTML/CSS may make a good intermediary format, but it is not particularly good from a performance or usability perspective. Then again, XML formats in general are fairly poor choices for the same reason.

I think if we want to break this conundrum, the industry is going to have to learn how to keep local data stores that are of high performance, while exporting intermediary formats when emailing or uploading to external computers. The only problem is finding a way of doing this so that it's completely transparent to users. The mythical "mom" doesn't want to worry about emailing a document in the right format, or having the right program to read the attachment she received. She just wants it to do what she tells it, with no bloody prompting with questions she has no answers for.

Re:fsck'n ugly

html/css sucks at MANY things - how about a self-updating TOC? (don't even try to say some javascript parsing the DOM for header tags with certain IDs to generate it dynamically!)

This would have to be done by the tool displaying it, same as a self-updating TOC in a Word or OpenOffice Writer document. The information is present in a correctly-structured HTML document in the form of Hx tags.

Hell, how can you even tell the page numbers in a html "document" anyways?

The same way you would in a Word document. It doesn't make sense if you're looking at it as a web page in your browser, but if your editor used HTML it would work the same way. (This also partially alleviates the rendering issues.)

Re:fsck'n ugly

I don't see (x)html + css as being the answer either:

Only because you can't tell the difference between "XHTML + CSS" and "web pages".

-too many versions of html (4, and perhaps 5 soon) and xhtml (1.0, 1.1, strict, transitional, etc)

So? Pick one as your word-processor standard, and rule all the others out. The existence of too many versions of MS Word doesn't seem to have hurt the .doc format.

-different versions of CSS, browser support for it varies quite a bit (and is pretty much non-existent for CSS3)

What does browser support have to do with word processing? We're talking about word processors, not web sites.

-too many rendering engines, css hacks required so the content displays the same in most of them, etc

And this is different from word processors how? Microsoft's XML format is absolutely crammed full of hacks to duplicate obscure rendering features of obsolete versions of Word, WordPerfect, etc. And it would surprise me very much if the rendering of ODF was pixel-identical between all the products that support it.

-html/css sucks at MANY things - how about a self-updating TOC? (don't even try to say some javascript parsing the DOM for header tags with certain IDs to generate it dynamically!)

You're thinking of web pages, not HTML. HTML used for a document could easily have an auto-generated table of contents. Remember that we're talking about using HTML as the file format for a word processor. A word processor can trivially parse the DOM for header tags and update a table of contents without requiring any JavaScript at all. It's kind of what word processors are for.

Hell, how can you even tell the page numbers in a html "document" anyways?

By looking at the little "Page N of N" display in your word processor, I would assume.

-while word/OOo formats aren't real typesetting (like InDesign CS2 would do), at least they have half-way decent typography. Yeah, no fancy glyphs or super precise kerning, but it's still usable. On the web there's only a handful of "just OK" fonts one can use (unless everything is rendered server-side as images).

What does "on the web" have to do with word processors? We're not talking about the web here. We're talking about word processors, which will have access to all the fonts the user owns, just like any other application.

-if people use html/css, there would basically be no standards *at all* or anything even resembling it (much like anything we see on the web).

Why not? We're talking about word processors, not the web. We're talking about computer-generated HTML, not something some 13-year-old hacked together by copying-and-pasting examples into Notepad. It would be trivial to enforce valid XHTML 1.1 + CSS2.1, for example.

Re:fsck'n ugly

So, McSmarty, how do I
  - position an image on page 4 of my document?
  - add footnotes?
  - embed fields (date, last editor...)?
  - mark the embedded TOC as TOC so that it gets regenerated on reload?
etc.

And on the CSS side, there are quite a lot of shortcomings, too.

Of course, all of this would work with custom XML tags or special id/class conventions, BUT then you'd have to specify those. And getting this below 700 pages won't be easy.

So repeat after me:

HTML is *not* a description language suitable for word processing in its current state, and it is unclear it can be made so without sacrificing device indepence.

Re:fsck'n ugly

I had a little go at using HTML for this kind of thing a few years ago. One thing that you might not be aware of is that CSS has a few things related to pagination. While you can't say 'put this image on page 4,' you can say 'if you need to put a page break in, put it before or after this div, so that this text and this image are on the same page.' For the table of contents, I wrote some ECMAScript that scanned the DOM tree for h1-4s and built a set of nested lists to display it, with links to the real headings. It didn't print the page number because, although this is possible with CSS it wasn't implemented in any browsers when I tried it. The embedded fields are already supported by meta tags in the document head. Footnotes, however, are a tremendous pain to get right with HTML.

I just dug out the template I wrote, and the pagination and ToC worked fine in Safari. The auto-numbering of headers, however, didn't. This is due to a lack of support for counters in generated content, and the same problem with Mozilla was a significant reason for abandoning the whole idea in the first place; the only browser everything worked in was Opera.

Another significant reason for abandoning this idea (not entirely relevant when talking about document formats being generated by tools) was that HTML is a huge pain to type, and XHTML is even worse. Something semantically equivalent to XHTML but using S-expressions would have been fine, but typing XHTML just involves spending far too much time hitting > and < keys (not to mention the redundancy of close tags having the full tag name). I turned to LaTeX, which is easier to type and also (being a Turing-complete programming language) much easier to extend than HTML.

Re:fsck'n ugly

So, McSmarty, how do I
- position an image on page 4 of my document?

You don't, nor do you want to. But you can anchor, float or bind the images to the text easily enough. This would be handled by css... for the HTML side, it would just be div and object tags --- not that you would ever see them, since this is an word app.

- add footnotes?

<p class="footnote">My footnote</p> with the appropriate CSS rule (presumably something like float: page or whatever.)

- embed fields (date, last editor...)?

Using XML entities, presumably

- mark the embedded TOC as TOC so that it gets regenerated on reload?

Regenerated on reload? Come on, have some ambition.. it should be in sync at all times. Anyway, by keeping tracks of the header tags, presumably.

HTML is *not* a description language suitable for word processing in its current state, and it is unclear it can be made so without sacrificing device indepence.

XHTML+CSS would need some expansions... but probably not much. A good layout program propably doesn't care about the device, but if it did, there are already @media tags to handle this situations. There are also a couple of other truly dedicated layout namespaces on w3 to consider.

But all this matters not. This is politics. Sadly.

Re:fsck'n ugly

So, McSmarty, how do I
    - position an image on page 4 of my document?
    - add footnotes?
    - embed fields (date, last editor...)?
    - mark the embedded TOC as TOC so that it gets regenerated on reload?

I'm on your side in this debate, but as a web dev I have knowledge over these things which you apparently do not. To embed a field, how about <meta name="author" content="TheoMurpse">. As for marking the embedded TOC, how about <div id="TOC">? For positioning an image on page 4, well, I don't know if you've ever looked at a DOC or ODT file, but the file itself says nothing about where page 3 ends and page 4 begins. Instead, you see that once the word processor has rendered the file. Thus, I see no difference between HTML and any other format. Hell, I don't even know if you can say "put this on page 4" in a LaTeX document. First of all, you'd never want to put it on page 4. Instead, you'd want to put it in between other elements, which may end up placing it on page 4, but then when you update your text on page 3, it may cause the image to need to be on page 5.

Footnotes are easy, too: Text Text that needs a footnote.<div class="footnote">This is the footnote</div>. That's the same concept as in LaTeX, the best typesetting software out there.

Re:fsck'n ugly

"The mythical "mom" doesn't want to worry about emailing a document in the right format, or having the right program to read the attachment she received. She just wants it to do what she tells it, with no bloody prompting with questions"

No offense, but I'm getting sick of this line of reasoning. You're right, mom wants the computer to read her thoughts, know exactly what she really meant when she said X, anticipate every need she might have, and pre-calculate its complexity out of existence.

In other news, my boss would like this entire website built in one hour ($40), never need support, and scale to 300,000 users.

At a certain point IT's job goes from "give every user what heshe wants" to "educate users about what is feasible in the current technological situation.

Classic quote for the books, gotta love XML play

"Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them."

Is it mature enough?

HTML and CSS are quite capable of rendering and displaying webpages. What happens with a simple thing like a file header showing page number and author name. Footers with footnotes? How about dealing with table of contents etc. How would a page in a document be broken down? Anyone who's tried to print HTML knows there are many issues with layout. What's sad though is that even HTML and CSS is not supported the same in all browsers.

I'm a latex junkie. Latex though is a PITA to create templates and styles for. Someone willing to take up the task to modernize latex or completely replace it?

Re:Is it mature enough?

I'm a latex junkie. Latex though is a PITA to create templates and styles for. Someone willing to take up the task to modernize latex or completely replace it?

Done. It's called ConTeXt [pragma-ade.com].

Re:Is it mature enough?

Tables are not obsolete. Tables are still used for tabular data, which is what they were originally intended to be used for, and that has not changed.

Tables shouldn't be used for page layout -- that's what CSS is for. It's as simple as that.

Re:Is it mature enough?

You mean you display tabular data *without* tables? Dude, you missed the point in a big way. Like say for example Andre Agassi was serving a tennis ball at you, by "missed" I mean he was serving the ball on a court in California while you were standing waiting to receive on a court in Florida.

huh?

Putting this to the test, Håkon has published a book using HTML and CSS.

Uhm. I'm no expert, but isn't a book that uses HTML and CSS called a website?

Re:huh?

Actually one of the highlights of the CSS spec is support for non-standard display types, such as screen readers, projectors, PDA, and yes, print. CSS is a rather brilliant standard, but since W3C hasn't really seen fit to publish a reference platform for it, there's no real compliance checking in the major browers.

Borat's here

FTA: Kazakhstan recently joined the relevant ISO group.

OMG, Borat is teaming up with Steve Ballmer to spew out 6000 page docs!! Run for cover!

CSS for Documents?

Having a word processor act more like a web browser would be awesome. Ever since I started using word processors (which for me was a long time after I started using web browsers), i've always thought, why doesn't updating this style make all text with that style update? Why do I always have to change the same thing over and over again?

While turning word processors into web browsers would be stupid, things like CSS would be awesome to have in word processors.

Re:CSS for Documents?

Ever since I started using word processors (which for me was a long time after I started using web browsers), i've always thought, why doesn't updating this style make all text with that style update? Why do I always have to change the same thing over and over again?

Such things exist. TeX provides a decent the base for such things, so it's a matter of finding a TeX centric editor. LyX would be a good example, and indeed it has the sort of functionality and general approach to document creation that you seem to be after. Of course it doesn't necessarily have all the other features that other word processors might have (like mail merge or what have you).

Re:CSS for Documents?

Indeed: LyX is extremely handy for providing to undergraduates or research assistants whose thesis advisors insist on using TeX or LaTeX, who lack the time to learn yet another language. LyX is the difference between having slightly more elegant .tex files, and getting an hour more of sleep a night when writing your thesis because you can edit in a GUI and don't have to debug your .tex files.

I am finding myself wishing that OpenOffice had pursued putting a vastly better interface on TeX and LaTeX, rather than writing their own standard. It would probably have been faster and certainly would have been a lot more stable. Microsoft couldn't have even thought about it: its clean, open standards would not have lent themselves to the proprietary "extend" part of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" approach, or Microsoft's software licensing models.

Re:CSS for Documents?

though at least before 2007 (which I haven't used so can't comment on) they haven't done much to bring attention to the feature

Word DOS (version 4 at least) had it back almost 20 years ago. And actually it was much easier to use styles back in the DOS version. Current versions try so hard to second guess you in the quest for user-friendliness and layering features on top of features that you can change or create new styles without knowing or intending to. Old-school required you to RTFA, but then you could use styles very efficiently. Now styles are much more sophisticated, but hardly anyone uses them correctly. I get docuements from all kinds of people, including many university lecturers. None, out of hundreds over the last 15 years, has had a clue of how to style their documents. Headings are "Normal" with font commands to make them large; body text is "Heading 1" converted to 12-point Times; bulleted and numbered lists are a minefield, tables are a quagmire of hacks, spaces and tabs, etc...

Re:CSS for Documents?

Having a word processor act more like a web browser would be awesome. Ever since I started using word processors (which for me was a long time after I started using web browsers), i've always thought, why doesn't updating this style make all text with that style update? Why do I always have to change the same thing over and over again?

Every word processor I've seen like forever has support for styles. The problem is:

1) It's impossible to avoid creating a million new styles by accident. Try looking at the styles list and you'll see it's full of junk
2) It's impossible to clean up a document with such a bunch of styles, for example say you have a document which has been completely fucked up with pseudo-styles. You've set "Normal" to be what the bulk text should be, and "Headings" to what they should be. What happened last time I tried it? Well, it was impossible to easily apply it without killing any bullet lists, bold, italics or any other intended variation of the normal text. Headers and numbering went beserk. Trying to do the same with the bullet list style lead to numbers going completely nutzoid, for some reason it thought everyone in the same style belonged to the same list so later lists would start at some random number.
3) If you for some reason is stuck copying between different versions of Word (norwegian and english comes to mind) then you'll have double the number of styles, which obviously aren't in synch.

So to sum it up what I would like:
1) Don't auto-create styles
2) This sentence does not contain three styles
3) Sane "apply style" functions
      - Parituclary directed at fixing a mess
4) Make styles have an ID, at least for the default ones make them international so header 1 is header 1 in every language
5) Ability to "style-lock" documents for things like company standards, you can create new styles but not just randomly change around sizes and fonts
6) More visible styles (OpenOffice does this, MS word doesn't) because people don't see them

I don't know that I agree completely

While I do agree that the ISO doesn't need more than one standard for printable documents, I don't think that Håkon Wium Lie is on the right track with HTML/CSS for print.

Sure, it works, with enough tweaking, and CSS3, and a $350 download of a product to turn HTML/CSS3 into a PDF. This is better how? What about LyX, LaTeX, or even OpenOffice if you are just going to convert to PDF?

The whole HTML/CSS-to-print thing shoots the real argument in the foot.

Re:I don't know that I agree completely

Why is anyone even talking about the opinion of a CEO? Opera is an HTML company -- they make HTML browsers. Why would the CEO of Opera have anything objective to say about OOXML or OpenXML? He wouldn't, which is why his pushes his own company's core competency: HTML. While Opera doesn't have a huge market share, if the market for HTML viewers grows, his company's likely to take a piece of that pie. But it's completely bunk because HTML's a mess of different standards, with many people using HTML 4.01 Transitional to this day, and the idea of people adopting CSS3 and writing documents using HTML is pretty far fetched. But you would never hear that from the CEO of an HTML browser company.

I don't think he gets it.

Hmm... both of these standards suck. I know what, we need another choice!

Somehow I don't think that's going to fix the problem. Oh, and pointing out that the Microsoft letter doesn't validate. Isn't that a little petty?

How come?

If forced to choose one, I'd pick the 700-page specification (ODF) over the 6,000-page specification (OOXML).

So I'd ask Håkon, "how come?" :)

Re:How come?

So I'd ask Håkon, "how come?" :)

Since nobody gets it, I'll spoil it: That's how Håkon advises people to pronounce his name. It's even on his business card.

XML

Both standards follow XML, because XML helps documents become universally available whatever the device. HTML and CSS have limitations.

Is there a FOSS way to make PDF from XHTML/CSS?

Prince is a commercial product. I have a minor need to produce PDF's from XHTML/CSS and I really don't want to deal with licensing. I would need to run it on a server where multiple people can access it which means I would have to pay $3800 for Prince. Ouch! I don't need to do this that bad. Is there any way to do this with Free/Open Source software?

Can != Should

Been a long time since I typeset anything, but I used Adobe Pagemaker when I typeset a couple of college magazines in the mid-90s and FrameMaker when I was maintaining courseware in the late '90s for Nortel.

HTML + CSS vs. Word vs. OO.o seems to me to be an argument related to formatting documents, not a "book". It's not that you couldn't do it, but I'd consider using Quark or InDesign (what seems to be Adobe's successor to PageMaker) or even Tex and its variants (haven't used any Tex-based stuff, but heard wonderful things) for typesetting.

Arguments about standards aside, proof of concepts aside, I'd think that the real issue when it comes to any job is using the best tool for it. It's not a question of whether you can use these tools to typeset a book, but if you should.

The point of the proof of concept is to prove that the system is flexible or capable enough to go beyond its original intended use. I get that. But proving a chainsaw can be used to spread butter, doesn't mean it's inherently superior to a coping saw.

- Greg

to kill a mockingstandard

An extract of H Wium arguments:

ODF is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of OpenOffice, while OOXML is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of Microsoft Office.

In 2006, a year or so after ODF entered the fray, Microsoft submitted OOXML to the standardization process. Are we seeing a pattern here? Is Microsoft undermining standards by submitting them? Could it be that it wants both ODF and OOXML to fail?

so Wium proposes to build a new standard from scratch , starting from HTML and CSS ; but, recognizing that they would not cover all "Office" documents, he goes to saying

Additional semantics (say, formulas in spreadsheets) can be encoded as attributes, as do microformats, and CSS 3 offers advanced features for printing (e.g., footnotes and header and footers).

My thoughts:

• Suppose MicroSoft were to listen to Wium (which they wont). Guess what ? Those additional fields containing formulas (and anything else that makes {MS,Open}Office much more useful than HTML) again would be just an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of so and so.
• I dont like , more in general this article. Wium is saying that MicroSoft is proposing OOXML to kill ODF ; and at the same time he is proposing to kill ODF in favour of a non-existent extension of HTML+CSS. It is like the guy saying : "I dont like the power plugs in my new house, lets tear the house down and rebuild it" , and at the same time saying "why are they taking so much time to build the house?". Suppose MicroSoft would use arguments as those by Wium to convince ISO to reject ODF and then start a new draft based on HTML, drafted in cooperation between MicroSoft and other partners (including OpenOffice). That would really kill any hope of an ISO standard for "office" documents.

Why not HTML for books?

HTML sucks for books. The reason is simple. HTML was designed for web pages. HTML does a fairly good job of covering the things you need when you create a web page (although, why is there no <menu>, and a bunch of other stuff that need to be fudged by using elements that don't really fit). In HTML there is no <chapter>, no <footnote>, no <toc>, no <index>. Also, with HTML, one file == one document. If you're writing a book, it would be nice to be able to for example have one file per chapter and include them all in a master file (assuming you're writing your HTML by hand, of course). That's not possible with HTML.

It would be possible to extend HTML to include such features or to create a HTML-like format that is more suitable for books (cf docbook). I agree that "word processors" today are a horrible mess, and we definately need something like a modernised LaTeX, but HTML isn't it.

I think it is an important point

I think it is important that a document format is humanly-readable and understandable, so that one can get at least some idea of the layout of a document by reading the content of the file. I understand very well when he says "memory dump in angle brackets". Besides, anything that is humanly-"parsable", can be parsed by software, while the other way around is not usually the case.

fonts

The problem with using HTML for publishing is that to this day there is no viable downloadable font system. So you are limited to a lowest-common-denominator list of 2-3 fonts like verdana and new times roman. With Flash and PDF you can do a lot more, but obviously authoring becomes a problem.

Too true

700 pages is not understandable by anyone but authors. "C programming language" book is 1/3 in size, have endured for 20 years and was instrumental in solving many more problems than word processing. Also, creating an ODF document is a minor function in most applications and is not worth the effort to understand such a huge standard. Proponents of both standards should come up with a modular design instead. At the base level, stick with basic HTML - bold and italic tags, fonts and sizes, paragraph breaks. Define many extensions that can be implemented independently or in any combination, in a manner convenient for both computers and, in a pinch, humans. Opera guy is biased as well - while basic HTML is great at its limited function, CSS is not very readable by humans. Nor does it solve pagination, collaborative editing, resolution independence, color profiles for printing...

I wrote my thesis book this way

And it worked out great.

http://software-libre.rudd-o.com/ [rudd-o.com]

Used MediaWiki to write the chapters, wrote a small python proggie (available there) to consolidate the wiki into a single HTML file (mostly conforming to the Boom! microformat), then used Prince and Hakom's book CSS to generate the PDF.

Great typesetting, collaborative book editing, screw LaTeX!

Hakom was right.

Maybe...

If Html+Css offered a better model instead of the box model (example the point-line model) and offered some way of doing basic data structures I'd agree. The current box model is very limiting in its layout abilities.

Modern documents have so many binary data types inserted in them (images, fonts, etc.) that Html+Css isn't enough. It isn't even enough on the web and that's why Javascript and Flash are so prevalent. There needs to be another specification to support all the needs/wants of the users (who are not willing to go backwards for any ISO standard).

!RTFA

Okay, I may have read a tiny bit, but it's irrelevant.

The question is `what does it do and how well does it do it?'

Should we desire for screen displayed content be equivalent to printed to published? No.

Do we desire for the three to have accessible translations between each other? Yes. And note that it goes both ways. I want to be able to throw an e-mail on a webpage and throw a doc on an e-mail and throw all three in a book and so forth. As more technology becomes available and therefore new mediums develop I want to be able to throw stuff in them and throw them in stuff.

Now sure, a book isn't that accessible to go back to digital (yet). Why not? Throw a barcode system in the books. They have an index and a table of contents and chapters and a bibliography. Why not a `printed information to digital information code' (PITDIC)?

But we're talking digital document formats.. which means that there should be what? What is the equivalent of having a barcode system in a book to allow a quick scan to give you all the data contained therein as a digital contents with relevant tagging/metadata? Uhh, dumbass. It's the metadata and the content, together!

Which is what XML and ODF and whatever dreck Microsoft has tried to override ODF with. Now, I have not studied the specific formats (so yes, you can call me an ass for being biased against MSFT), but if they are properly designed then they are a step in the right direction. What is properly designed? It's when they are simple and basic and elegant enough that we can change down the road and not break the old.

We're not children anymore, humanity. It's time we think about how to do that. And before you bitch at me, note there's a difference between being obsolete/technologically inferior and broken. Broken is when I can't access my old stuff. Obsolete/technologically inferior is when I don't want to.

ODF a memory dump of OOo?

I wonder if it's true, after all there are two implementations of ODF: OOo and KOffice, it'd be interesting to hear KOffice developers on the subject.

Recently I hear a criticism of ODF by Miguel de Icaza is that ODF doesn't reuse standards like SVG as much as it should..

Open Office Herecy (sold here)

I use OpenOffice. I support Open Document Format over MS/XML and .doc.

That said, ODF it kind of blows. Really.

I write novel-length "books" and it is FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE to do some very basic things in any/every ODF based word processor I have tried to date.

Exercise for the Interested:

Make a "Book" with an automatic table of contents, said table to contain an "Authors Note", "Prologue", auto-numbered chapters 1 to N with their associated chapter titles (where the actual chapter number is the chapter number internal variable), and finally "Epilogue" all at the same level of the index.

This simple task is essentially impossible. The flaw is caused by the fact that everything goes through the "styles" and the styles don't inherit their list membership properties. You should be able to make a style "TOC Entry" that is assigned to a particular table of contents level (e.g. level 1) then make a sub-style "Chapter Heading" based on "TOC Entry" but with the chapter numbering magic attached, and in so doing, create "different styles" that go to the same level/point in the list.

Exercise for the Interested:

Make a "Book" with each chapter, and the prolog, and the epilog in separate sub documents. The linkage thing is a mess, it is hard to move "the pile of files" around especially if you want to use subdirectories (etc). If you have a custom style in the master document style list you have to _USE_ it in the master document if you want it to be pushed into the created sub-documents. Once the sub-documents are created it is a royal pain (read effectively impossible, or "supremely hidden feature required") to update those styles in those sub documents if you change that style.

Exercise for the Interested:

Put three separate "outlines" into one ODF Document. In ODF the outline is a function of the style headers, they only exist as implications of structure instead of first class abstractions. This is largely the fault of Microsoft Word, since the Word folks totally messed this up when they supplanted WordPerfect (which did this inset outline/object sort of thing right).

ODF was, IMHO, poisoned by the slavish attempt by someone trying to make a Word killer instead of a "good word processor."

And there are stacks more of these issues.

And all that said, I *STILL* use ODF (Open Office etc) because I CATEGORICALLY REFUSE to _RENT_ the right to access my own work from a third party. Microsoft has plainly stated that such rental model is their intended business plan, which makes them a non-starter.

In my opinion, having used both Word and OpenOffice for years; and having used Word Perfect and wordstar before them, ODF is a "workman like effort" to create a document format suitable for "normal business purposes". There is a reason that the legal profession never moved over to Word, and they likewise will not move to ODF, when you need to get to a tightly proscribed document format, both Word and ODF have a "you can't get there from here" fundamental limitation. Both formats simply refuse to represent some things because the designers "know" that a different format is better. Neither ODF nor Word has any allowances for _art_, professional or poetical.

So, governments should use ODF because it is "no worse" than Word in terms of the ability to represent the documents it can represent, and given that congruence, the shorter, 100% open standard is, or should be, a hard minimum requirements.

In terms of ODF being the be-all and end-all of document representation, I'd have to say "hardly!" I looked into the OpenOffice code base a while back to see if adding/changing the format to allow for "a book" would be reasonable. It didn't appear to be. Too many of the original StarOffice assumptions about document structure seemed pathologically uninspired. It was like looking at a big pile of Visual Basic. Everything in the standard is way too global, nothing "nests organically" it all nests pedagogically. (Every

You're using the wrong tool.

Using a word processor to write a book is like using stone tablets and and abacus for spreadsheets. You really ought to look at markup-based typesetters like LaTeX or DocBook or software specifically designed for book production.

output, at most

HTML/CSS is at most only an output format, i.e. one uses it as the final presentation format, like PDF or ps. To actually write and edit something (even through some GUI), then save, reload and make significant changes is absolutely horrible with it. This was supposed to get better when CSS was introduced, but somehow the format specification failed miserably (IMHO, of course).

I'm not a fan of the two mentioned formats either, way too much bloat. somehow that seems to be normal with xml based formats (but that's probably just a pet peeve of mine).

Google docs

He wants HTML/CSS documents? Isn't this what Google docs do?
Anyways sounds like a good idea to me. I often have to share documents and I don't like to have to force people to install a specific application just to read them.

Um... NO

ODF is not about web pages or word processing. It's a standard for office documents including spreadsheets, presentation and word processing. That's a big difference from what Opera's CTO is talking about. CSS/HTML might make a good format for one part of the suite (word processing) with a lot of work on the standard. The issue: that's not what is needed for a standard. It's about doing for office documents what HTML did for websites. ODF is actually an opportunity for opera - extend the browser to support ODF so people can post ODF documents, make dynamic applications render to ODF and so on. It takes the web to the next level and further erodes the big monopoly.

OK, then here's a challenge for the Opera CEO

Build a word processor that uses html/CSS with options and flexibility comparable to OpenOffice.

Actually, I have every confidence that Opera can. . . I've been a happy Opera user since 1999.

Why is this an issue?

How about Microsoft and OpenOffice just keep their own XML formats? One of the great things about XML is that you can use XSLT to transform one XML document into another one with different syntax. As long as both products can open, display, and convert the other format then I don't really see the need for a standard in this situation.

A standard is going to limit innovation in word processors unless you specifically allow extensions in the standard, which kind of defeats the purpose of a standard.

If the goal is to send out a document that anyone can read, then convert to PDF or a web page. "I shouldn't have to convert b/c I'm a stupid user" you say? Don't expect a 600-6000 page standard to solve this problem.

Compilation

"2 standard formats is not a good idea"

"That's the reason I'd wish to add a third"

I wish he didn't ruin the entire opinion with all those html/css pipe dreams, they are so extremely unrealistic besides of all the mess that would actually be to adapt them in a useful way for office formats. Really this was kind of a shame.

I could also write a book in .txt but that doesn't make it any better of a format for office software.

My idea for a document format

My idea for a document format is something like Tex, but with dynamic a.k.a. just-in-time compilation. This way it would be fast enough to be interactive.

Packages would be translated into binary VM code. When a document is opened, they would be dynamically compiled or interpreted and would be able to respond to mouse or keyboard actions.

Hello World in Office XML

He's telling me that this is really difficult to understand and parse?

Sure it's not as clean as HTML for such a small bit of text, but it's not impossible to wield, unless you want pixel accuracy, in which case, CSS is difficult as well.

Office XML document:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<pkg:package xmlns:pkg="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/200 6/xmlPackage"><pkg:part pkg:name="/_rels/.rels" pkg:contentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-pa ckage.relationships+xml" pkg:padding="512"><pkg:xmlData><Relationships xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2 006/relationships"><Relationship Id="rId3" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/extended-properties" Target="docProps/app.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId2" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/20 06/relationships/metadata/core-properties" Target="docProps/core.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId1" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/officeDocument" Target="word/document.xml"/></Relationships></pkg: xmlData></pkg:part><pkg:part pkg:name="/word/_rels/document.xml.rels" pkg:contentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-pa ckage.relationships+xml" pkg:padding="256"><pkg:xmlData><Relationships xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2 006/relationships"><Relationship Id="rId3" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/webSettings" Target="webSettings.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId2" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/settings" Target="settings.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId1" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/styles" Target="styles.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId5" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/theme" Target="theme/theme1.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId4" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/fontTable" Target="fontTable.xml"/></Relationships></pkg:xmlD ata></pkg:part><pkg:part pkg:name="/word/document.xml" pkg:contentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-of ficedocument.wordprocessingml.document.main+xml">< pkg:xmlData><w:document xmlns:ve="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup -compatibility/2006" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:o12="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/200 4/7/core" xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeD ocument/2006/relationships" xmlns:m="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeD ocument/2006/math" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:wp="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawin gml/2006/wordprocessingDrawing" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordpro cessingml/2006/main" xmlns:wne="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/wor d/2006/wordml">

<w:body>
<w:p><w:pPr><w:ind w:left="720"/></w:pPr>

<w:r w:rsidR="00F4543A">
<w:t>Hello World.</w:t>
</w:r>

<w:r w:rsidR="00F4543A"><w:br/></w:r>
<w:r w:rsidR="00F4543A"><w:br/>
<w:t>Hello Universe.</w:t>
</w:r>

</w:p>

<w:sectPr w:rsidR="0074581F" w:rsidSect="008A7339"><w:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840"/>
<w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1440" w:bottom="1440" w:left="1440" w:header="720" w:footer="720" w:gutter="0"/>
<w:cols w:space="720"/>

PDF?

Putting this to the test, Håkon has published a book using HTML and CSS.

Strange, when I click on the link, it takes me to a page with several links. The top one is a book about using HTML and CSS, and is distributed as a PDF. Seems to me that if you are wanting to make a point about using HTML and CSS to distrubute data, you would distribute your paper arguring this case in the same format.

It's called "programming"

Object-oriented programming concepts should have sorted out this mess years ago.

1) Write a class for each document type, with methods to construct the logical document structure (eg, add paragraphs to a report, define the author name, whatever).

2) Define a set of standardized rendering interfaces (screen, printer, audio, etc).

3) Write some renderers for various (document-class, rendering-interface) permutations (eg, one that renders articles to the screen, or books to the printer).

You're welcome. :)

imagine the conformance suites

If the point is for businesses and governments to adopt a standard, then at some point, a credible third party (standards body, government agency) needs to produce a conformance suite, and vendors need to show that they pass with flying colors.

Given the 6000 pages for OOXML and 700 for ODF, it will be interested to see if either will be done. Just imagine the test cases and the explanation of what they do.

I start to understand why Håkon Lie doesn't much care for either.

Re:Scribus?

Good, glad to see I'm not the only one wondering why Scribus hasn't been mentioned (even if the other person is an AC).

I publish a PDF magazine [justthings.info], I wouldn't use anything except Scribus to lay it out. I'm considering a print-CSS version, but I'm confused why anyone would make a print-CSS version and then convert it to PDF. To me, this seems to miss the point of both formats.