3monkeys

Rob Weir recently posted “How to hire Guillaume Portes“, which appeared on Slashdot, both of which both are great resources for additional comments and debate. The basic premise of Rob’s article was that the Microsoft Open XML Specification was similar to creating a job description that would allow for only one qualified respondent. Such a job description might read as follows:

• 5 years experience with Java, J2EE and web development, PHP, XSLT
• Fluency in French and Corsican
• Experience with the Llama farming industry
• Mole on left shoulder
• Sister named Bridgette

While perhaps a little extreme, he continues to show that indeed the Open XML Specification is indeed written to accommodate Microsoft products. I will not bore you with all of his examples, but here are a few are worth inspection.

2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing)

This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 95) when determining the spacing between full-width East Asian characters in a document’s content.

[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]

and

2.15.3.51 suppressTopSpacingWP (Emulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing)

This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (WordPerfect 5.x) when determining the resulting spacing between lines in a paragraph using the spacing element (§2.3.1.33). This emulation typically results in line spacing which is reduced from its normal size.

[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]

This gluttony is further illustrated by the shear complexity of the specification. As many 3Monkey readers know, I’m conducting a series of articles comparing the ODT and DOC formats. With Microsoft Office due to hit consumer shelves at the end of January, I thought I would get a jump on things and download the OOXML specification to get a jump on things. To my surprise the Open XML specification comes in 5 different PDF files with an 6 accompanying electronic annexes in excess of 43 megabytes. For comparison the ODF specification is a single 11 megabyte PDF, with 3 separate XML schemas. The ODF specification weighs in at a mere 722 pages, where as, the largest PDF in the Open XML specification is 5219 pages long.

While I have to wonder at Microsoft’s motivation for producing the Open XML standard, I do not have to guess at the motivation for ODF. Started as early as 1999, ODF was designed as an open and implementation neutral file format. The open specification process started in 2000 with the foundation of the OpenOffice.org open-source project. An even higher level of openness was established in 2002 with the creation of the OASIS Open Office Technical Committee (TC). ODF had gained full adoption with it’s early adopter including OpenOffice.org 1.0 and StarOffice 6 being introduced in May of 2002 and KOffice adoption of the ODF format in August of 2003.

IBM has provided the one voice of reason in this travesty. IBM voted against the certification of Microsoft Office document formats (Open XML) as an international standard at a general assembly of Ecma International in early December 2006. Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of standards and open source, confirms Mr. Weir’s sentiment that the ODF standard is of superior quality, versus Open XML which he considers to be “a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML“.

Open XML has been submitted to the ISO for standardization. I encourage each and every reader to oppose this standardization effort. Further details will be outlined on this blog as they become available.

Until next time-

-3Monkeys

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 6:51 am and is filed under Microsoft, ODF, Open Source, Standards, XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.