OpenDocument Voted In By ISO

cduffy writes "OpenDocument has been voted in as ISO/IEC 26300, with no dissenting votes and a small number of abstentions. There are still several formalities to take place before final issuance. Now the question: Will OpenXML get the same treatment, despite its technical weaknesses? There's also coverage on Groklaw."

Re:Sabatoge?

[XiQ]

As far as I know ISO only has standard organisations as members, which represent a country (ANSI for the United States). As I remember Microsoft took place in a workgroup, which only makes minor edits (IANASG). See http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/isomembers/Memb erCountryList.MemberCountryList [iso.org]

mathML sucks.

[zippthorne]

MathML is the worst way to store formulas ever. Anything that takes 5k of text to specify int(from 0 to infinity, exp(-lambda*x**2)dx) correctly is simply stupid. It means hand coding mathML just isn't a viable option for more than a couple very simple equations. We should agree on something similar to a C, Fortran, Matlab, or other programming language notation as the standard way to store equations in the file. The added benefit of potentially being able actually execute at least some of the functions is just icing on the cake.

On a related, but somewhat less relevant note is that I can't find any inexpensive programs that allow the generation of mathML easily. There are a few out there that generate mathML at all, but they seem to concentrate on the typesetting aspect of mathML* and on having an obtuse interface. Why isn't there a easy-to-find, cheap or free (beer or speech), mathML editor that is as easy to use as the equation interface in LyX? (and yes i've tried export-html options in LyX, and attempted to manually convert with commandline utilities but my latex2html functions all seem to be completely braindead.)

*iirc, there is a way to use mathML to store calculable functions, but I have yet to see this implemented, and it takes even MORE text to store the equations.

I think the lack of available editors, and tex converters, especially considering the potential academic utility of mathML is pretty good evidence that it is a poor standard: it hasn't generated enough interest for someone to scratch the itch and write a decent converter/generator/editor.

Not technical, but business reasons...

[Svartalf]

OpenXML is patent ridden and in a way that is problematic at best, compared to OpenDocument. ODF is also patent ridden, but unlike MS' offering, the patents have free licensing for conformant implementations and conformant means to the official stated spec, with the possibility of extensions becoming part thereof- unlike MS' offering which requires you to meet MS' shifting definition of what is/isn't compliant (i.e. it's not explicitly stated...) and you don't get to add improvements unless MS embraces and extends them themselves (i.e. if you've got extensions and MS doesn't approve of them, you're NOT at all compliant and can be sued for patent infringement...).

Technically, they're the same. This is the reason why people can't understand why MS is insistent on NOT supporting ODF as a format and trying to push OpenXML- unless they've got some ulterior motive. Now, they've little valid excuse for it.

Re:What technical weaknesses in OpenXML?

[DrXym]

The Groklaw article points out a few of them. The most damning is that Microsoft has chosen to ignore existing, reusable standards like XLink, SVG, Dublin Core, etc. for their own proprietary tags. These standards were expressly produced because they represent reusable patterns that many document formats need but which shouldn't be respecified by each of them. The upshot is that parsing OpenXML will be a massive pain in the butt because none of your existing scripts / tools / editors etc. that may have built-in knowledge of existing standards will not work with OpenXML.

Re:Good news

[CastrTroy]

I just tried it. MS Word 2002. New document no text, 20 KB. 500 Words from Lorem Ipsum, 23 K. 300 pages of that same first page repeated. 1,128 KB. OpenOffice.org 2.0. New Document no text, 6 KB. Same 500 words from lorem ipsum, 10 KB. 300 Pages of repeated text, 22 KB. Wow, too easily compressed. Lets try 300 pages of non repeated text. 329 KB. You save quite a bit. I find that once you start adding images and other things like that, you end up saving even more space.

KOffice will run on Windows very soon

[ingwa]

What is remaining for ODF to be healthy standard - is competing implementations. KOffice is limited to KDE which doesn't run under Windows.

On the contrary, KOffice will run on Windows very soon. Kdelibs are being ported to Qt4 as we speak, and almost runs under Windows already. The same is happening with KOffice, and I think we will see a proof of concept of KOffice running on Windows before summer this year.

OOo != ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing the 'effeciency' of fruits to the effeciency of fruit squeezers? ODF is the file format. MSOffice is an application. The linked article compares the ODF reading/writing capabilities in one implementation (OpenOffice) to that of Microsoft using its binary memory/OLE dump. You're not looking all to bright by doing that.

The linked article, btw, starts to spreads unfounded idiot opinion at the paragraph that explains the file format specifications are "a non-issue" to the author and goes further with lying: "But this is argument is fundamentally flawed because the existing Microsoft Office binary formats are effectively the de facto standard and are effectively open to anyone."

If the meaning of the word "open" is twisted to "can be implemented with lots of guesswork" and "compatiblity can be broken by a whim of Microsoft", then, yes, the author is right. But as it reads, the author here just slightly invented a "fact" to bring his point around.

Re:"technical weaknesses" ?

[dubonbacon]

DUH of course, it's binary vs XML file format!