New York Decision On ODF Vs. OOXML Approaching 160
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."
anybody? (Score:3, Funny)
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Write! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't do something as quick and simple as writing to ask for something, what right do you have to complain when you don't get it. If just a small fraction of the people here write in support of ODF, that will be a huge and impressive response.
There's enough complaining about OOXML et al on this site. Put your money where you mouth is.
Re:Write! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see - the NY taxpayers are already paying this CIO's (probably hefty) salary, and she is supposed to recommend that which is best for her constituents.
From all the info I've seen regarding the matter, ODF and OOXML are two document standards. One was written by committee and has the support of multiple companies, organizations, and individuals. The other is written by a monopoly and has support of no one except MS and their paid shills.
The fact is there is absolutely no reason for a government body to go with MS's lock-in format considering the technical merits of both, and most especially the past behavior of MS. OOXML is a pseudo-standard, purposefully obfuscated to keep the MS monopoly gravy-train running smoothly.
If these government agencies can't start making no-brainer decisions in the interest of their constituents, perhaps it's time that these positions were simply abolished...
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That's not exactly a fair assessment. Microsoft's name-recognition alone carries quite a lot of weight with companies, organizations, and individuals.
Although I don't particularly like Microsoft, if two salesmen were tryin
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The 'open' standard is incomplete in addition to being a complete mess.
Re:"locked in"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only Microsoft has the blobs required to make MOOXML work. Only partial compatibility can be attained by other in the best of cases. OTOH ODF actually *is* an open format which is properly documented and which does evolve in the open.
On top of that, I'm not certain whether all of the Microsoft users can actually read/write MOOXML files. A large number haven't switched to the latest version of Office and don't seem to want to (or cannot if they're on Macs). In small structures I doubt they even know about the translator add ons for their version of Office (if it's even available for their version).
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It can't.
Try hand-creating a MOOXML file with a text editor, then loading it into Office 2007. It's VERY easy to write documents which conform to the "standard" but aren't correctly parsed by Office 2007.
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Let's switch to ODF then explain to millions of other people that we would be appreciative if they ignored the money they spent on Office 2007 and switch to an older interface that doesn't do quite as much.
I love OpenOffice and use it on my desktop at home, my company is part of the ODF alliance, but I would never switch my day job's network to Open Office simply because of the fact that we have to do business with the rest of the world. (Which bothers me quite a bit, considering I love the concepts
Re:"locked in"? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I wish! Then we'd be rid of idiots like him!
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This is to do with open *standards* for *information*. The beef is about control over your information, for reasons of interoperability, automation, preservation and a having a vibrant, free-market, competiti
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Part of the rationale for OOXML is that organizations and developers can extend it with additional features:
Re:Write! (Score:5, Informative)
* 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.
Don't get greedy, now. (Score:2)
The standard must be completely specified. It must be able to be implemented with no other information not present in the standards documents.
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Google "autoSpaceLikeWord95" [google.com] and start from there.
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That's proof of "it's not even fully documented," not "even MS itself doesn't use the specification." Like I said, it's a starting place.
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This is a New York government function, they would be perfectly within their rights to throw away all input that isn't from New York residents.
Re:Write! (Score:4, Funny)
How about this?
Dear CIO;
I'm not from New York, but I'm on the Internet. The same Internet that thinks Ron Paul, lolcats, and "2 girls 1 cup" are great, so I obviously know more than anyone technical.
I don't know anything about your actual requirements, but you should pick ODF, because OOXML is from Microsoft. ODF 1.2 is in committee right now, and it will plug all those holes in ODF, like spreadsheet formulas not being specified, so don't let the fact that you can't do anything useful in the current version without lots of vendor-specific non-standard extensions bother you. Vote for Ron Paul!
Requirements (Score:2)
Sorry, but I think your "requirements" are wrong (Score:2)
Anyone who's a citizen knows enough about the requirements to make the fundamental point: that the information a government generates belongs to the people, and should not be tied up in a format that is controlled by a single organisation.
The latter does not follow from the former.
A responsible government should make the information it generates available to the people, for as long as it may be useful (which may be indefinitely). Whether they do this by publishing it in some popular electronic format(s), or by providing reference copies and any hardware/software necessary to read them at public libraries, or by posting a printed copy to every citizen, or through some combination of means, doesn't really matter. What counts is that the pe
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Of course it matters! You've obviously never tried to interface different systems or to find some way of using legacy data that no one makes a reader for any more. When a commercial company goes bust (or deliberately shuts d
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Of course it matters! You've obviously never tried to interface different systems or to find some way of using legacy data that no one makes a reader for any more. When a commercial company goes bust (or deliberately shuts down a division), all of the contracts you have for support are null and void.
No, it really doesn't.
No matter how "standard" some electronic format is today, it's still unlikely that 50 years from now your average home computer (or whatever the equivalent is by then) will read the legacy file format, or that any standard server (or whatever the equivalent is by then) will read the legacy physical media on which the original data resides. In the meantime, even if some business with a proprietary electronic file format goes bust, it's not like their software suddenly stops working,
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Do you actually have any experience of government's need for historical archiving? It doesn't sound like it. Just go listen to Peter Quinn's speech on ODF, if you want some evidence against what you're saying.
As for it not being my problem. I'm a citizen. In a democracy, citizens are R
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Being Diplomatic (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly though emphasis on the "polite" part. Imagine how persuasive someone can be when they're not a dick about it and when they just lay out some good clear arguments :)
Re:Being Diplomatic (Score:4, Informative)
Advice on History final (Score:5, Insightful)
Grammar on a final examination is as important as grammar in a letter to your congresscritter.
May your professor mod up your exam score.
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Does it? Write some more code: you'll appreciate having quoted strings close when they are done. In other words, this rule is false.
As for 'congresscritter', one should actually refer to congressman or congresswoman. Having decided to go cute and call him a critter, there doesn't seem to be much point in dividing the non-word.
Finally, it would have been more impressive if you'd not gone anonymous.
Thanks for playing.
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Re:Being Diplomatic (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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Plus: that's nearly 700 pages that are reutilized , so the bulk is just a few pages, most of which is already compatible with Excel's formulas (minus the bugs, I hope) and as such already used by software such as GNUmeric or OpenOffice.org
That's not a problem, that's a relief! It would be a problem i
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(And the correct url is http://www.oft.state.ny.us/News/erecords-study.htm [state.ny.us])
From the site:
With those cav
When is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps... it's when the company who wrote it won't pass it over to standards bodies [slashdot.org].
Perhaps we ought to have "varying" standards for road design... or we should have ever-changing standards for building construction.
Considering this is public documents are at stake, it is our history. It is no less important than safety.
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South Carolina doesn't give even highways a foundation - their roads are built on piles of sand, with maybe a little gravel crushed on top. Not even the three-layer roads of Macadam and nowhere near the five-layers of Telford. As for building construction, building codes change after disasters (rarely before, when it might have been useful) and aren't exactly impressive. Part
Re:When is.... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are zillions of things wrong with OOXML, so why do people keep picking things that are ALSO problems with ODF? It would be a lot more effective to pick those areas where ODF is actually different and better, and push those.
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They don't have to. The source is opened and what ODF is has been released to the community at large.
Anybody with the appropriate manpower can effectively freeze what ODF is.. just call it GAODF- government approved ODF.
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That's not quite correct. ODF is covered by Sun patents. They have made those patents available for free under a license that covers ODF 1.0, plus any future versions whose development Sun participates in past the point where OASIS would require a patent license. (You can find the complete text of the license at the OASIS web site if you want to see for yourself). So, future versions have to have Sun parti
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I'm a New York State resident and... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Which means now is definitely NOT the time to give up.
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not to be a pain, but (Score:2)
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Not even Windows users like OOXML (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not even Windows users like OOXML (Score:5, Insightful)
They are fairly incompatable, and not even Office can open all of the versions correctly:
95, 2000, XP, 2003?
There is no "doc" standard, it is just the memory dump of the version of Office, which changes with each release, and that is the problem.
TXT would indeed be better, if only because it isn't going to change in the future.
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TXT would indeed be better, if only because it isn't going to change in the future.
What kind of TXT? ANSI? Unicode? UTF-16? Big endian? Little endian? etc, etc.. I know, my examples are probably wrong, but the point isn't.Re: (Score:2)
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Notepad in Windows XP forces you to chose between 3 different text formats (with useless names), and there really are many, many more.
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I keep seeing this repeated everywhere, but, same as with many things considered "common wisdom" on Slashdot, was not able to find any authoritative reference to back the fact. In fact, for one thing, it is definite that .doc is a COM Structured Storage file [wikipedia.org] - so it's certainly not exactly a plain memory dump. Knowing how structured storage is usually used, it's most likely a serialized graph of COM objects. Anyone care to find
Re:Not even Windows users like OOXML (Score:4, Insightful)
I know the parent is probably going to get modded into oblivion, but they made an interesting point that will probably be missed. Why do we need to store all the information in a fully formatted document. I know that good ol' A4...or American Letter standard will persist for a long time, but surely if it's just the information we need to retain there would be a better way of storing it without all the formatting cruft thrown in that makes it hard to decipher if you don't have a massive spec to write a loader from.
Afterall everyone here is mainly worried about retaining the information in a format that is readable by future generations right? right!?
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Here's the rub; ODF is open, but even though Microsoft doesn't have to go through the trouble of revers
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I don't see why we can't just go with plain old .doc. Sure it isn't as "open" as ODF, but OOo and Office can read them well enough (now if I got to make the plans, it would just be plain .txt, fast and easy to read, who needs formatting) to see what they are saying.
There are too many, different versions of .doc and no, the majority of programs cannot read and write them "well enough" now. Anyone who's ever managed an archive of documents has probably run into .doc files that cannot be opened by any currently available version of Word. One of the things ODF is solving is the security to know in another 5 years you'll still be able to open your files. The .doc format mess does not provide that security.
So why can't they go with .doc?
If the reasons I mentioned above are not enough, it is anti-com
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HTML does not handle all the use cases of office documents smoothly and is a pretty terrible format for exchanging documents since in many cases you'd be exchanging entire directories of files instead of a single file since all the resources in HTML are stored by reference.
I wholeheartedly agree that HTML isn't really the optimal format for document exchange, and your first point (that it doesn't handle all the necessary use cases) is quite valid. However, the latter point is not necessarily a big problem. Everybody and their dog has an implementation of zip by now, so something as trivial as a zip file with an index.html file and a resources/ directory with all the needed external stuff would be a pretty open and portable way to address the issue. Also, refer to the Apple
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I wholeheartedly agree that HTML isn't really the optimal format for document exchange, and your first point (that it doesn't handle all the necessary use cases) is quite valid. However, the latter point is not necessarily a big problem. Everybody and their dog has an implementation of zip by now, so something as trivial as a zip file with an index.html file and a resources/ directory with all the needed external stuff would be a pretty open and portable way to address the issue.
So you're saying if only there were a format that was a superset of HTML (like XML) and would provide the needed functions and it and its resources were organized into a standard set of directories and then zipped up that would work? (I'm being a bit sarcastic here, since that is a pretty good description of what ODF is.) Rename a .odf file to .zip and you can unzip it and browse through the "pictures" directory easily.
Fuck document formats. XHTML and SVG work fine. (Score:3, Interesting)
XHTML is the container. It allows for textual documentation to be represented, and allows for other data representations to be embedded within that container. Its native support for tables makes it usable even as a spreadsheet (which can be powered by JavaScript).
CSS allows for very complex document layout and stylings to specified with ease and conciseness.
SVG can represent nearly all vector-based pictorials, including many forms of graphs. Bar charts are easily represented with rectangles, and a pie chart is easily represented as a collection of filled arcs. SVG's scalability allows for these charts to be resized really easily.
PNG images can be used for all other images that aren't best represented using SVG.
PDF is the perfect format for bundling all of those other resources together in a medium that displays on almost any system.
Best of all, those are all open standards, with free implementations available for almost every operating system and platform. There's just no need for this ODF and OOXML bullshit.
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PDF (Score:3, Informative)
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
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Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are several issues with the idea you posted.
PDF is a great format for publication, but crap for information exchange. You need some sort of "work format" to do the heavy lifting for you before you can commit the document to its published .pdf form. Regarding that "work format", I'll assume that by "XHTML" you actually meant "XML", since the latter is a general purpose mark-up language, and the former a domain-specific application of the latter, and this whole discussi
Can anyone let loose XSLTPROC on some MOOXML data? (Score:2)
Now that this format war is so heated, it would be really advantageous to *verify* all the different vendors' implementations of ODF and MOOXML, by using that DTD you mention to validate that it's "really" correct, and send in bug reports when
Lets all use HTML for documents! (Score:2)
What about in 10 years time, or 100 years time then the W3C spec have changed, or your HTML files on the census of people in NY for the year 2007 don't display correctly anymore.
It's not about today, it's about tomorrow and the next day.
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What about in 10 years time, or 100 years time then the W3C spec have changed, or your HTML files on the census of people in NY for the year 2007 don't display correctly anymore.
That is very true. It is unlikely a web document written today will render well, even in as little as 10 years.
However, if in a 100% open well defined (no fuzziness) specification, there will be relatively lossless converters that can be run over the data to convert it with minimal effort.
If in a spec like MOOXML, there is suff
And invent time travel (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing I want to know.... (Score:1)
Can someone tell me when the last time they tried to compete on innovation rather than vendor lock-in?
Can someone make the argument that OOXML is all about document protection for the consumer and not about keeping everyone else on the run?
Can someone tell me that Vista was supposed to make everything better for the USER?
Can someone tell me why I need DRM in my life?
Can someone tell me that C# is open and
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is when Microsoft is going to stop the shennannigans and start playing ball with the rest of the world.
When they stop making money off of shenanigans. Innovation takes time and money, it's cheaper to copy other people.
Can someone tell me when the last time they tried to compete on innovation rather than vendor lock-in?
I'm pretty sure that was before I was born.
Can someone make the argument that OOXML is all about document protection for the consumer and not about keeping everyone else on the run?
Probably, but I doubt it would be a very compelling argument.
Can someone tell me that Vista was supposed to make everything better for the USER?
Well, it's supposedly more secure...
Can someone tell me why I need DRM in my life?
I'm sorry, it's not your life. Read the EULA on the last piece of music you heard: "We, the RIAA own your soul. By listening to any music in any form, you agree to this binding contract."
Can someone tell me that C# is open and not proprietary? It only runs on one platform, theirs? How is that better than writing natively? The UI is only for IE with .NET? Why would I want Silverlight over Flash?
Does Microsoft even pretend C# is open? If so, is it covered
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I'm no MS fan but check this link Mono [mono-project.com]
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*cracks knuckles* Ok!
When it's no longer profitable to play shenanigans. Which has two fewer 'n's in it, by the way... Firefox has an auto spell checker built right in these days, y'know.
The XBOX line of products, off the top of my head.
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Cleveland in the dark (Score:1)
And thus spake the pedant (Score:1)
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Oh, Come Now (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, Come Now (Score:4, Funny)
New York, who cares what they think! (Score:1)
You do (Score:5, Insightful)
pdf (Score:2)
--Sam
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Where's the public comment page? (Score:2)
Article link dead. Try this one: (Score:2)
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If you have something to say...write an email. Otherwise don't...it might count the opposite direction of what you thought it would.
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