So when I saw the title of this article (slashdot link), the first thing I did is check the calendar; nope, it’s not April 1st. Then I checked to see if it’s an article from The Onion; wrong again. So now I’m left wondering what’s going on. Apparently Microsoft will add support for ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, and not their new OOXML format.
What the hell Microsoft.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, the part about ODF being supported natively is great news for people who understand why truly open formats are needed. Good job Microsoft for finally implementing it. But the whole OOXML part is very strange. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money conducted some questionable practices to get OOXML committed as an ISO standard. But you can’t actually USE this standard in Office until the new release?
There’s been a lot of articles online about this whole OOXML controversy, ranging from the various technical issues [pdf] with the standard to committee stacking and other irregularities in the actual voting process. I’m sure a bunch of this is just Microsoft hating, but with all the events and issues surrounding it, it makes you wonder. And the fact that you cannot use it in Office until Office 14 (release date TBA, of course) doesn’t help their case.
In reality, this doesn’t really affect me that much since I only use LaTeX for typesetting and PDFs for reading anyways. And really, it’s not that bad of a thing, since ODF is finally getting included as a supported format in Office. But this is not going to help OOXML at all, and so it begs the question as to why they’re not including it as a standard in Office 2007.
well there are a few reasons why; first of all ODF already has a lot of traction in terms of acceptance (it helps it’s been around for a while longer as well), and second of all since OOXML has just been made an open standard, Microsoft has lost it’s controlling stake in the standard. In fact, the moment the file format got standardized, it already had 2 major specification changes by the new OOXML committee create by ISO to increase the interoperability of the format with ODF. I’d imagine Microsoft would like to delay it’s deployment of OOXML until all the necessary standard changes have been decided upon.
Comment by Huan — May 21, 2008 @ 5:35 pm
Ah, I guess that makes sense, it doesn’t make much sense to include a half-finished format in a product. I hope with this we’ll stop having different formats with every release of Office.
Though I’m still bitter about all the committee stacking that made it into a standard in the first place.
Comment by cubekid — May 21, 2008 @ 5:48 pm
And how do you “only use PDFs for reading”? What if your professor/employer sends you a .doc? I’m all for typesetting with LaTeX, but sometimes there’s just no way around proprietary formats…
Comment by dougr33d — May 22, 2008 @ 2:00 am
For about the last 3 semesters, all my professors have had PDFs for anything they send out, so I’ve been lucky there. And on the off chance that there is a .doc, or even a .ppt file I need, I use Google Docs. But I hope I didn’t give the impression that everyone should switch to only using PDF and LaTeX; I was just saying that that’s all I need as of now.
Comment by cubekid — May 22, 2008 @ 9:20 am
*leaves a comment*
who is this microsoft anyway?
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Comment by keaan — May 29, 2008 @ 3:17 pm