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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: FYI: Petition for Microsoft to support OpenDocument
From:       Jaroslaw Staniek <js () iidea ! pl>
Date:       2005-11-03 19:24:34
Message-ID: 436A63F2.1080307 () iidea ! pl
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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: \
<citation>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.</citation> 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 \
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