[Wylug-discuss] Why Office Document Standardisation Matters to *Everyone*

[David Holden]

On Friday 09 February 2007 2:17 pm, Dave Fisher wrote:
> A few posters have questioned why a few of us have a 'bee on our bonnet'
> about this issue.
>
> The appalling lack of coverage in large parts of the 'OSS-friendly'
> media (Slashdot and The Register spring to mind) seems to confirm
> widespread ignorance and confusion on the matter.
>
> For example, if you search for 'open xml iso' on Google news:
>
>   http://news.google.co.uk/news?num=100&q=%22open+xml%22+iso+&btnG=Search
>
> You see a cluster of 70 articles in the first item returned.
>
> If you click through the link called "all 70 news articles", you'll see
> that the vast majority of articles are MS PR puff pieces celebrating the
> arrival of a crippled OOXML-ODF translator, i.e. the standards issue has
> been crowded out by something which has very little to do with it.
>
> So why is the translator "nothing do with the real issue"? Or to put it
> another way, what is the real issue?
>
> The real issue is:
>
>   *Networked* Data Integrity
>
> At the most superficial level, the problem with Microsoft's proposed
> standard is that it ensures that third parties can never exactly
> reproduce the data and formatting in MS Office documents, while
> pretending/promising the opposite!
>
> In other words, most people will never be able to switch to alternative
> products without accepting some degredation of their existing data ...
> how many large organisations are ever going to accept that?
>
> But there are even more important practical and philosophical issues at
> stake here.
>
> Like Will Newton, I hardly ever use office UN-productivity suites like
> MS Office, Open Office or even KOffice.
>
> I write almost exclusively in plain text or plain text markup languages
> (HTML/XML/LaTeX, etc.) ... precisely because I don't want to tie my data
> to any particular application.
>
> However, like everyone else in our networked world, I still find myself
> having to read and write snippets of information/data that have been
> composed or edited by someone else who did use office tools.
>
> Moreover, my everyday life depends on software which automatically
> (re)processes data which has been previously handled by other people's
> office tools, e.g. my bank account, tax, websites, email, etc.
>
> Tiny mis-translations in such procedures can have annoying, costly, and
> very occasionally, catastrophic effects.
>
> Messed-up currency symbols on websites is one example of a trivial
> annoyance. At the other end of the spectrum, we could have events *like*
> the Mars mission that crash landed because of a failure to properly
> convert between SI units and Imperial units.
>
> One way of avoiding such mistranslations is to have unambigous standards
> for coding and processing the data and the metadata. So that
> applications can automatically (and reliably) validate the data/metadata
> *before* processing them.
>
> If hidden and ambiguous data/metadata from MS Office is allowed to be
> slung about willy-nilly from one networked app to another, without
> third parties being able to check for its integrity, we'll all be a lot
> worse off.
>
> Indeed, non-Microsoft and non-Office users will be far worse off than
> the people who use the complete MS toolchain, since Microsoft users get
> some 'benefit' from consistent brokeness.  It's similar to the hardware
> drivers issue, only *much* more important.
>
> It's probably only in the last 2-3 years that most people have begun to
> use applications which occasionally exchange fragments of data with one
> another over the net automatically. There will be a lot more of this in
> future.
>
> As such, it's only now that the deficiencies of proprietary office
> formats have become a tangible issue, which governments have reacted to
> with demands for open standards.
>
> Unfortunately, it looks as though the vast majority of governments and
> end-users (inluding OSS users) have failed to realise the shere depth
> and breadth of the problem.
>
> Dave
>

Hi Dave,

 Not been able follow this for time reason, in principle I agree with all the 
above well articulated points. However a different slant on the issue seems 
to have been given by Miguel de Icaza


http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html


Now since the Novell deal with M$ one may be tempted to discount his views 
however some of his points on first reading seem reasonable in particular 
regarding the size and detail of the standard.

 Dave.


 

-- 
Dr. David Holden.

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