[odf-discuss] News on MS pluggin

[Alex Hudson]

marbux wrote:
> Sorry for the delay in answering. I caught up on my sleep last night,
> slept a full 12 hours. :-)

:) I can sympathise; I'm jetlagged from the US right now...

> I didn't realize this would be so controversial. Unfortunately, I've
> got an NDA on my best source of relevant information

Please don't take what I'm saying as being argumentative; I'm just weary
of ODF supporters making unsupportable statements about OXML. You're the
first person I've heard saying that there's a translation layer in Office.

If we can't back this up publicly, then we probably shouldn't say
anything _unless_ we can actually prove it ourselves. But - I'm not sure
you'd need to see the source to prove it; I think we can infer it in
other ways if someone gets access to Office 12.

E.g., the stuff about VML versus DrawingML - Brian Jones has now
publicly stated on his blog that VML is only going into OXML because
they couldn't be bothered to update all of Office to DrawingML, and that
it will go away in the future. It's basically legacy crap going straight
in there. That's stuff we can quote, and we can back up with statements
from Brian.


> . So probably the best I can offer as a public source is a lack of a
> denial by Brian Jones. See my comments at <
> http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/09/21/764988.aspx>.

Perhaps - he's also sometimes slow to comment on his blog. I guess we'll
see.

There are kind of pros and cons to both ways of doing it. If you
translate OXML to binary, then I guess you get roughly the previous
Office plugin more or less for free (modulo ripping out some advanced
features). So that could make sense.

Conversely, although there are dataloss bugs in Office, by and large
Office is (and needs to be) a pretty stable piece of software -
businesses rely heavily on it. Introducing a translation layer
introduces another interface where things could go wrong - I would be
amazed if Microsoft had done that; it's not like they lack programmers.
And while you have "brittleness" on the part of Office, it seems to me
you just export the problem to another interface by translating, and
you're also hoping that _they_ know the binary format well enough to do
that.

I know people rip on Microsoft for poor code, but those who actually see
MS code - including the dodgy version of Windows 2000 which made it out
onto the net - seem to say it's generally very good. While Office is
undoubtably a huge pile of code, I would bet it's in better shape than,
for example, OpenOffice.org.

-- 
Alex Hudson
IT Director, Stratagia Ltd.
P: 0845 226 17 13     W: http://www.stratagia.co.uk/
F: 0845 226 17 14     E: alex (at) stratagia.co.uk