New York Decision On ODF Vs. OOXML Approaching

christian.einfeldt writes "In August of 2007, the State of New York passed legislation requiring its CIO, Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, to gather information on the advantages and disadvantages of adopting either ODF or OOXML as a document standard, and to report her findings by 15 January 2008. As part of her duties under that legislation, the CIO issued a Request For Public Comment to get feedback on the topic. The deadline for that public comment is 28 December 2007 — so there is still time for the Slashdot crowd to be heard."

Re:Being Diplomatic

[kc2keo]

correct... another words use constructive criticism should you add input before the decision is made. List the pros and cons and be clear and to the point. Its kind of like a resume... If the employer sees many misspelled words, way to long, or with a font thats hard to read, etc will be ignored. If I was to write in with feedback I would put what I want in bullet points and have the text bold. Under that I will argue the pros and cons etc... I would follow the same form throughout my commenting. I find it to be the best way to get your point across. Forgive my horrible comment grammer but I just wanted to add my comment to the discussion. Getting back to History final exam prep along with the Spanish one... :-(

Re:Write!

[Anonymous Coward]

The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an open standard:
        * The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
        * The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
        * The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
        * There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

These commonly accepted criteria are enough to ignore the whole OOXML vs ODF discussions as OOXML patent licesing conditions only fake compliance. No one trusts the OSP and the CNS from Microsoft. And openness of the ongoing ISO process is a running gag.

Re:Fuck document formats. XHTML and SVG work fine.

[CastrTroy]

In case you didn't know, ODF is basically just what you mentioned. If you rename your ODF file to .zip, you can open it and see all those files inside. It doesn't use XHTML, but it does use XML to store the document text and structure. It stores all the style information in another XML document, and it stores all the pictures in a folder called Pictures. All this is wrapped up in a little zip file.

Re:Being Diplomatic

[harlows_monkeys]

Refer to government open standards, how OOXML isn't a stable standard and is ungoing massive changes at Ecma

The problem with that is that ODF is also undergoing massive changes. The version currently working its way through standardization adds the OpenFormula spec to ODF, which is something like 25% of the size of ODF. That's a pretty massive change!

Re:Not even Windows users like OOXML

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point entirely. OOo can read .doc files without plugins because the formats were reverse engineered and are included as part of the OOo install. It's far from perfect however, because there's still a lot of missing puzzle pieces that haven't been figured out; but the fact of the matter is, MS Office is such a juggernaut that if OOo couldn't read .doc files, OOo would be long dead by now.

Here's the rub; ODF is open, but even though Microsoft doesn't have to go through the trouble of reverse engineering it, they continue to refuse to include the capability to read and write ODF out of the box. I even believe they've claimed that it isn't possible, even though the existence of those plugins you mentioned show them to be the liars they are.

If MS can't ram their closed "standard" through and the world continues on the current open standards trend, they will be forced to include it if they want to continue selling to a large majority of governments, public institutions and end users. And by doing that they will FINALLY give users a real choice.... hmmmm I can pay $600 for MS Office to create ODF files or $0 for Open Office to write ODF files.... hmmmm.... I wonder which one I can fit into my ever tightening budget.

As a side note: I just spent many many hours writing an EETT Education Technology Plan for a school district using OOo on my Linux laptop and then in the 11th hour was told that it had to be submitted in .doc format. I can tell you right now, I probably spent as many hours fixing the formatting and other issues that came up as a result if the conversion from OOo to .doc as I did writing the damned thing and it still wasn't 1/2 as pretty or 1/4 as functional. Not to mention the fact that it was damned inconvenient that I had to borrow a system to finish it or that my only other choice if I wasn't able to borrow that system would have been to buy and install both MS Windows and MS Office.

That's ~$600-700 that MS doesn't deserve, but would've gotten because the person/agency I had to submit the document to had bought in to their monopoly and is now trying to squeak every penny they can out of it by forcing others to use it.

Re:Not even Windows users like OOXML

[mabhatter654]

ODF at its heart is a zipped folder of unicode formated text files. In 10 years when nobody cares you can still fire up a perl parser and run thru the files in a standard fashion to pick out your data. OOXML doesn't ever guarantee you will get by with anything less than a full office suite.

Holy crap - read the survey

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone actually read this survey?

It sounds like these folks have done their homework.

Check out Part 2.

Re:"locked in"?

[mattpalmer1086]

Gah. Here's a FAQ you may find useful:

Q: What does open office and MS Office have to do with a document standard?
A: Nothing.

Q: What does the GUI of your word processor have to do with the format you save a document in?
A: Nothing.

Q: Why do you need to use open office if you use ODF?
A: You don't, use whatever software you like.

Q: What does the open source software development model have to do with open information standards?
A: Nothing.

Q: Does using ODF mean that communists will steal my children?
A: No.

Q: Will aliens eat my brain if I equate information standards with software implementations?
A: Yes.

Re:"locked in"?

[hey!]

Doesn't it matter exactly what the standard does?

Part of the rationale for OOXML is that organizations and developers can extend it with additional features:

Second, the custom data are embedded in any OpenXML document in a Custom XML part (3.7.3) and can be described using a Custom XML Data Properties part (4:7.5). By separating these custom data from presentation, OpenXML enables clean data integration, while enabling end-user presentation and manipulation within a wide variety of contexts, including documents, forms, slides, and spreadsheets. Interoperability can thus be achieved at a more fundamental and semantically accurate level.

(http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/OpenXML%20White%20Paper.pdf)

So users (including application vendors) can extend the format to meet future needs. Sounds good, until you realize the claim made above is technically impossible: you can't guarantee semantic interoperability with vendor extensions, only syntactic interoperability. In other words you can parse the custom bits into their components, but you don't necessarily know what to do with them.

The upshot is that you are not only locked into MS products, you are thoroughly chained to their upgrade cycle as well. One of the great attractions of having a standard is the idea that you should be able to interchange documents between Word 2020 and Word 2015; however this can't be guaranteed. On top of this Microsoft's own track record with consistently rendering its own formats between app versions is poor, and combined with the sloppiness of the OOXML standard, you can't even count on upward compatibility.

OOXML fabricates entirely new component standards for things like vector drawing instead of using existing standards like SVG. This means you are not only locked into MS products in cases where 90% of the world uses them, but you're nudged into MS products where only 10% of the world uses them.

Finally, it is inaccurate to frame this as a choice between MS Office and OpenOffice. It would appear that MS is the only organization that can create a fully compliant OOXML implementation, whereas ANYBODY can write ODF, whether they are commercial vendors like IBM/Lotus or open source projects like Abiword or Gnumeric. Furthermore if Microsoft refuses to implement an ODF standard, MS Office users could still work with ODF by several mechanisms, such as an Office VBA extension, through an XSL transformation program, or by saving in a legacy format and processing with the OO import filters. The undocumented proprietary features of the document would of course be stripped out by this, but that's the very point of having a standard: to have your documents in a completely documented format.

PDF

[blueZ3]

I work in publishing, and the format that we generally use is PDF, for just the reason you state. The typeface, page sizes, etc. are all contained in the PDF file, so there's no problem with footnotes moving pages, because the contents of the pages are fixed in the file.

I wish PDF were completely open and that we could convince everyone who distributes documents to use PDF for that purpose. All the problems you mention are just as troublesome when opening a Word file on two different machines (which is why "real" writers/publishers don't use Word). I can't tell you the time wasted on some of the rinky-dink (non-paper-published) projects I've seen where two people opening the same Word file saw different things because Word displays pages based on any number of different parameters that are not the same between machines. Heck, it doesn't even PRINT the same as it displays.