comments need approving before they will appear |
|
| Interested to know what you think of Bob Sutor's comments at http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=783 | |
| Ian Brown | I.Brown@cs.ucl.ac.uk | http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/ | 7 Jul 2006 @ 05:19 | |
| Thanks Ian. My most immediate thought is that our customers have asked us to guarantee 100% backward compatibility before they're prepared to move to XML from the existing file formats. That means support for formulae in spreadsheets, the legal requirement for accessibility support and so on. And from a legal / historic archives perspective, the look, feel and content of docs is important: we've heard time and again it's not acceptable to just 'drop' content, or to have spreadsheets that don't support formulae, or to ignore the accessibility needs of users (at both a human dignity and legal level). We've been supporting XML file formats for some 5+ years now and Open XML is the latest iteration, reflecting new features in Office 2007 - so it's simply not true to imply that it's something new. Yes, we all agree XML is the right way to go. And we know people want these to be open file formats - which is why we've done precisely that. And maybe over time some sort of uber-format will emerge - although I think the idea the world should have one single file format fit for all purposes will probably fly as well as the concept that Esperanto would solve the world's language problems. I was customer side during the grandiose days of committee-imposed GOSIP: what a waste of enormous public and private resources that proved to be. Successful interop is not about imposing a single standard - otherwise I'm not sure interop would even need to exist as a concept as there would be nothing to interop between. Most customers I talk to don't care about file formats. Their focus is on tackling identity problems, inter-agency sharing of appropriate information and the like. We need to view file formats as enabling components of solving these customer issues, not an end game in themselves. And the fact that users will be able to move to XML without any loss of fidelity - and to interact with other file formats such as ODF, PDF, RTF etc - is what seems important to me here. |
|
| jerry | http://ntouk.com | 7 Jul 2006 @ 07:59 | |
| I'm very glad to see this - it's something that I've been suggesting MS back all along, because the best way to show tht OpenXML is a richer format than ODF is not to produce a list of comparitive features but to let people round-trip documents in both formats and see how much survives. The easier it is to prove your pudding, the higher the better dough will rise (I think I'm kneading the metaphor). | |
| Mary Branscombe | www.marybranscombe.com | 11 Jul 2006 @ 14:04 | |
| Hi Mary - thanks for this. I'll be posting again soon on this topic as discussions with various technical and policy folks has produced some rather interesting discoveries. I may pass on the re-use of your metaphor however! best regards |
|
| jerry | http://ntouk.com | 12 Jul 2006 @ 11:39 | |
