[odf-discuss] Microsoft and Novell cooperate on document formats

[Nicu Buculei]

Ian Lynch wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 14:41 +0100, Thomas Zander wrote:
>> Just FYI;
>> 1) OOo is more then 10 years old (well, the codebase is, ~12 years)
> 
> And XML file formats? XML itself is barely 10 years old and XML 1.0 was
> not W3Cd until 1998, only 8 years ago.  Even if the code base is 12
> years old the relevant document format could not have been designed
> until more recently. Are you saying that with unlimited resources, all
> the improved tools and libraries available and the benefit of hindsight,
> the development time for the XML file based versions of OOo could not be
> reduced to less than 10 years? Doesn't seem at all likely to me.

I don't have the exact date for when OOo started working on XML file 
formats, but it was *after* Sun's acquisition of StarDivision in 1999 
and the support was fairly complete 3 years later in 2002.
It appears the XML specification was ready around the end of year 2000: 
http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/milestones.html, about 1.5 years 
before the 1.0 release (December 2000 to May 2002).

>> 2) OOo implements just a part of ODF [1] The ooMath part is said to be 
>> just implemented about 20% of the whole spec in OOo.
> 
> Which is precisely the point. No-one defined the 10 years thing as
> implementing everything in one application AFAIK. If that was the
> intention it needed to be stated a lot clearer.

The part of ODF not implemented by OOo was not part of the original 
specs, it was added in the meantime, full support for ODF is a moving 
target, is not possible to implement it 100%.

>> 3) ODF is about 1/10th the size of MOOX.
> 
>> Do the math :)

This is misleading. Is just silly to put things this way: the first 
specs for OOo file format was published 6 years ago, the specs for MOOX 
are 10 times bigger so OOo will need 60 years to implement them at the 
same level as ODF.

-- 
nicu
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