RTF Vs. OOXML 141
Rob Weir has an interesting essay comparing the viciousness of RTF and OOXML: "The [document format standard] concerns of 2004 (or 1995 even) are very similar to the concerns of 2007... 'RTF is defined as whatever Word saves when you ask it to save as RTF.' This should sound familiar. OOXML is nothing more than the preferences of Microsoft Office. Whenever Word changes, OOXML will change. And if you are a user or competitor of Word, you will be the last one to hear about these changes. The coding of Office 14 a.k.a. Office 2009 is well underway. Beta releases are expected in early 2008. But are file format changes needed to accommodate the new features being discussed in Ecma? No. Are they being discussed in ISO? No. Are they being discussed anywhere publicly? No. By owning the 'standard' and developing it in secret, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible, while at the same time ensuring that their products maintain an insurmountable head start in implementing these same standards. Is this how an open standard is developed?"
Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry (Score:5, Informative)
No.
Here's a copy of the draft OpenISO.org [openiso.org] "Problem Report" entry for this issue:
Microsoft's attempt to essentially unilaterally dictate office document standards is an abuse of their dominant position
Problem description:
Normally standardization is conducted by means all interested parties participating in a discussion of the desired features, so that all interested parties have an essentially equal opportunity to develop products implementing the standard.
By contrast, OOXML is simply documentation of the document format that Microsoft's products already use, and there is no indication that Microsoft would intend to make the details about future versions of OOXML available to competitors before Microsoft is ready to release their own implementation of the new features for public beta testing.
Expected impact:
To the extent that OOXML is accepted as a standard, all of Microsoft's competitors will be encumbered with a permanent economic disadvantage.
Possible solution:
Reject all claims about OOXML in some way being a standard, and take legal action, on the basis of national and international competition law, against Microsoft as well as against Ecma and all other organizations which are guilty of aiding and abetting Microsoft's anticompetitive actions.
Re:well, not effortlessly (Score:5, Informative)
However, you should look to older and other standards. HTML - 4 versions and all of them work seamlessly together, although newer versions may not have the pizazz in older renderers. WordPerfect and WordStar, good examples of how file formats don't have to break backwards compatibility from what I recall.
As for winsock, that was a poor port of the BSD socket stack. Actually, it's a really poor port. Multicast still doesn't work, and if it did, an entire set of applications could occur with much lower traffic on the internet. (Think IPTV, IPRadio, and other streaming type applications)
Re:Standardize RTF first (Score:1, Informative)
The documentation is available only in DOC or DOCX, why not in HTML or TXT or some international document standard like PDF or ODF?
From a comment in TFA, there seems to be a hidden list of previous versions:
"A while back Brian Jones, a Microsoft Office project manager, claimed good interoperability pedigree for Office applications since they can read and write "standards such as RTF and CSV". I took him to task over that one because neither of these is a standard; they are standins for standards. CSV is extremely unstable across versions and languages of Excel, and as far as I can tell is undocumented except to Microsoft developers. RTF is simply a representation of every version of Word. I took the trouble a while ago to compile this list, since such a list does not exist online from Microsoft:
* March 1987: An article by Nancy Andrews of Microsoft.
* 1.0 1987: Word 3.0 for Macintosh
* 1.0 June 1992: Word for Windows v2
* 1.1 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.2 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.3 January 1994: Word v6
* 1.4 September 1995: Word v7 (Word 95)
* 1.5 April 1997: Word v8 (Word 97)
* 1.6 May 1999: Word v9 (Word 2000)
* 1.7 August 2001: Word v10 (Word 2002)
* 1.8 April 2004: Word v11 (Word 2003)
* 1.9 January 2007: Word v12 (Word 2007)
The worst part about this "standard" is the license: it is packed in a Windows-only executable package and is licensed for noncommercial use on Windows machines only.
# posted by Blogger Sean : Thu Dec 20, 04:33:00 PM EST
Re:It's not the standard, stupids (Score:3, Informative)
Now, my post and the above is more accurately accessed as "flamebait". His point is lost inside a wall of meandering text, which is really just a a vehicle for his ineffectual expression of contempt for "FOSSies". Here's some advice - don't hide like you're afraid of losing your precious karma, and don't be so stupidly wrong. If you want evidence of consumer choices and Microsoft's growing irrelevance, look at the list here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/ [amazon.com]
Re:well, not effortlessly (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22dos+isn't+done+until+lotus%22&btnG=Search [google.com]
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=microsoft+stac+lawsuit&btnG=Search [google.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics [wikipedia.org]
Stac executives were outraged, as Microsoft had previously been in discussions with Stac to license its compression technology, and had discussions with Stac engineers and examined Stac's code as part of the due diligence process.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=%22microsoft+stole%22+technology+partners+stole+stac&spell=1 [google.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft [wikipedia.org]
Burst.com, which claims that Microsoft stole Burst's patented technology for delivering high speed streaming sound and video content on the internet.
Caldera, which accused Microsoft of having modified Windows 3.1 so that it would not run on DR DOS 6 although there was no technical reason for it not to work.[64] Some claim that Microsoft put encrypted code in five otherwise unrelated Microsoft programs in order to prevent the functioning of DR DOS in pre-releases (beta versions) of Windows 3.1.[65] Microsoft settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum.
Spyglass, which licensed its browser to Microsoft in return for a percentage of each sale; Microsoft turned the browser into Internet Explorer and bundled it with Windows, giving it away to gain market share but effectively destroying any chance of Spyglass making money from the deal they had signed with Microsoft; Spyglass sued for deception and won a $8 million settlement.[67]
I can't find any mention of the Corel wordperfect vs Word95 thing any more. I guess 1995 was almost pre-internet. It was well known at the time tho.
Re:RTFM 'against' OOXML (Score:4, Informative)
That's not an accurate description. The point that article makes about the spreadsheet is that OOXML distributes information all over the place so that to make the simple change of replacing a formula in a cell with a constant it is necessary to edit multiple files. The problem is not that you can't make changes inconsistent with the schema - it is that the schema is poorly designed.
Furthermore, the spreadsheet example is only one of several cases discussed, so even if you were to rebut it successfully the article would still contain a valid critique.