RTF Vs. OOXML

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?"

Re:well, not effortlessly

[kanweg]

"I wouldn't say this is entirely true (effortless) on Microsoft's part. Any user of any Microsoft product is well aware of how difficult it is to work in and out of various new vs. old formats. Yes, even Microsoft has a difficult time being compatible and interoperable with Microsoft"

The problem is mainly caused by trying to develop a convoluted standard to make it difficult to create a standard that is difficult for others to figure out AND then understand your own convoluted standard and how to make it compatible with your previous convoluted standard which others already deciphered for a major part.

Bert

Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[morgan_greywolf]

To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format. And it still pretty much is, although changes were made late in the process to further ensure document portability and to improve multilingual support. OTOH, OOo will always follow the standard rather than define the standard. A standard isn't defined by one product, it is something that products follow.

I don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.

Office 2007 not even compliant

[Bayesela]

On top of OOXML being developed in a closed environment, MS Office is not even using the proposed ECMA or ISO spec, they including all types of tie-ins. This article explains more: not even compliant [fanaticattack.com]

Re:well, not effortlessly

[samkass]

In theory VC-1 is the "open" descendant of AVI. It is part of both the Blu-Ray and the HD DVD spec, and roughly equivalent to WMP9's file format. It's kind of interesting that no one talks about needing to read VC-1, while there are zillions of MP4 players and even quite a few AVI players.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[krazytekn0]

Becuase still, somehow our schools know next to nothing about the value of open standards. Microsoft word viewer is "required" by my college but it would be fairer to say that MS Office 07 is really what all the Profs are trying to "require". I turn in pdf's and at least one instructor asks for a word document every semester.

Re:I'm sorry, I don't get your point.

[thogard]

Output on different devices is what a word processor does. Other wise its "process" step wouldn't be anything at all. And the 1950's model doesn't consider "storage" part of the I/O model but modern sanity sort of would imply it unless its direct memory or object dump.

Words storage model is odd. It doesn't match the input model but is sort of based on the output model assuming line printers with loads of hacks to make it work with modern printers. As far as I know its been that way since I was using Word (for Unix on a 3b2) in 1987.

Re:Standardize RTF first

[Fast Thick Pants]

Microsoft's published RTF specs for a quite some time now -- the latest version of the spec is 1.9 and you can download it from Microsoft [microsoft.com] in your choice of binary .doc or MS-OOXML .docx, sorry no .rtf!

The spec is actually not bad, though the continued efforts to shoehorn in new features gets a little laughable. Here's an example of an RTF-reencoded XML tag from the spec:

{\*\xmlopen\xmlns0\xmlsdttpara{\xmlname Title}}}{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0
\insrsid1978110 \hich\af0\dbch\af11\loch\f0 Atlas Shrugged}{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0
\ltrch\fcs0 \insrsid136785 {\*\xmlclose}}

As far as I know they've never tried to have RTF ratified by any standards body, but it's still very widely used. People have a lot of files named .doc around that are actually RTFs, and some word processors (AbiWord for one) actually use .doc-named RTFs as their "Word" format, since, having a spec, it's a lot easier to write than the binary .doc format. By design, old Word versions and non-Word software ignore any tags they don't understand, and I'd guess that most modern third-party RTF parsers and encoders are designed around the 2000 RTF spec (version 1.6) without all the new stuff.

Re:OOD has doomed us all to bad standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, read up on typesetting. I can write a TeX [or LaTeX] document using syntax that is decades old, and it will render the way I want on any platform that has the open source freely available tools installed.

The fact that Office [and OO.o] are worthless for consistent looking documents doesn't mean that computers as a whole can't do the job. Just use better tools.

Office suites are meant for quick and flashy documents [e.g. clipart havens]. Typesetting tools are meant for consistent reproducible professional documents.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Inda]

I know this isn't ask slashdot but couldn't she have just uploaded it to YouTube and got them to convert it?

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Maxo-Texas]

That's really not the case.

In fact, look up how it went down for Word95 and Windows 98.
Word violated the api standards but was given the "approved" mark anyway.
Corel which followed the standards was much slower.

Microsoft cheats all the time. They are commensurate scammers.

Sometimes, it feels like the world is crazy because no one seems to recall things like
1) specifically checking if DR Dos was installed- and if so give a hard installation failure.
2) "Dos isn't done until Lotus won't run"
3) Doublestac
4) The entire "95" certification scandal.
5) The *numerous* partnerships where they robbed every bit of technology from the technology partner and then brought out a competing product.
6) The numerous times that they added a 50 to 60% functional but "free" version of something of a competitor's product to the operating system.

and so many more examples like this.

They are extremely competitive scammers. Which is okay if you own their stock. But not okay if you want to do something for the common good like standard.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Androne]

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)

Multicast still wouldn't work since the vast majority (at least here in Canada) of ISPs filter multicast packets because they think they are the same as broadcast packets and thus increase network traffic, I know about this since I worked on a project that had used multicast data transmission for communication and it worked on the local area network (a win2k network) but not when we tried to do it over the internet.

Like I said it turned out the ISP was filtering multicast and several told us they had no intention of turning it on because it increased network load. We explained that the difference in broadcast and multicast and that multicast would effectively lighter it they wouldn't believe us. This was my experience here in Canada 5- 6 years ago.

I will admit this was 6 years ago and things could have changed but I doubt it, ISPs in Canada tend to stagnation at times, it works so leave it alone. To use multicast you had to use Winsock 2.2 if I recall correctly, and we did see a tremendous benefit the network load on our project was greatly reduced.