From koffice Thu Nov 03 19:24:34 2005 From: Jaroslaw Staniek Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:24:34 +0000 To: koffice Subject: Re: FYI: Petition for Microsoft to support OpenDocument Message-Id: <436A63F2.1080307 () iidea ! pl> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=koffice&m=113104567908057 Alejandro Exojo said the following, On 2005-11-03 12:13: > El Lunes, 31 de Octubre de 2005 11:34, Jarosław Staniek escribió:> >>Hello KOffice users!>>>>* Microsoft has stated that they will support the OpenDocument format in MS>>Office if there is customer demand:>>>>http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051016105739574>>>>The purpose of this petition is to quantify the customer demand for>>OpenDocument support.> > > Just an innocent question:> > Do you think it is really a good idea to have OpenDocument in MS Office? I'm > thinking in the "embrace and extend" strategy. It will suck if they figure > how to add "bugs" that make their files look different in different office > suites.> What you're proposing is more or less: isolationism. You can play isolationism in parallel a world where you are enjoing 90%+ market share with your format :) Open standards are designed for use by everyone. Everybody here know about embrace-and-extend dirty tactics developed by MS. But don't forget that with ODF you will be able to stand up and say to your software evendors: ODF support is poor in MS apps, while our organization depends on it. Improve it and back here _or_ go away. For now you have _no_ such ability. MS has its super-dirty super-secret set of "memory dump" binary formats + a set of "open as long as you buy us" XML specs (I've seen that these do not even support styles!).Customers from government who are in process of migration to MS XML, being in trouble, keep sending XML files and asking to company I work for: They - We are unable to open that with OpenOffice, what to do?Me - OpenOffice supports OpenDocument XML and (old) properietary binary formatsThey - Oh. Isn't OpenOffice XML the same ad MS "Open" XML?Me - No, it's entirely different thingThey - Then, we were fooled by somebody. Summing up: wait a few months more with ODF not being available (read: familiar) to everyone and people will forget about it. MS will be able to push its own 100% controled XML much easier.I could see a reason to push ODF to MS as a way to cause MS completely dropping proprietary MS XML. The petiton is not the only way, I would equally much (or even more) like to see _small_, _robust_ plugin for reading/writing ODF by MS Office. > And I say "bugs", because many people think that the way box problem with the > CSS rendering of IE, is intentional, to make web pages look different in one > browser or another. It's a bit different story:- HTML/CSS code is usually generated by humans. ODF is machine-generated. Humans are lazy, they need to work harder (e.g. thing more intensive) if they want to comply with w3c standards. OTOH, ODF support can be fixed once per application.- HTML/CSS is most usually used as read-only data. A single ODF file can be edited by multiple people on different platforms and software versions. For read-only solutions, we're still comfortable with PDF. -- regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek / OpenOffice Polska Kexi Developer: http://www.kexi-project.org | http://koffice.org/kexi Kexi support: http://www.kexi-project.org/support.html KDE3, KDE4 libraries for developing MS Windows applications: http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDElibs+for+win32 ____________________________________koffice mailing listkoffice@kde.orgTo unsubscribe please visit:https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice