[odf-discuss] What is actually necessary and found only in OpenXML?

[M. Fioretti]

background: these and the other questions I have posted in this thread
today are meant to provide me with as much material as possible for
something I *could* have the possibility to write later in the
summer. I am posting them now, before I forget or lose my notes,
because almost surely I will have zero or no time at all, due to
family and day-job issues, to follow ODF things in the next weeks.

Thanks for any feedback and of course thanks to Marbux for his very
detailed answers!

On Fri, May 25, 2007 02:50:00 AM -1000, marbux (marbux at gmail.com)
wrote:

> First, it is vital to understand that Ecma 376 (EOOXML) and
> Microsoft Office Open XML (MOOXML) are not one and the same. EOOXML
> is at best a extremely crippled subset of MOOXML.

Are there links summing this up? (the more and from more different
sources the better, of course)
 
> Second, it is equally as vital to understand that EOOXML is only
> read by MS Office apps, there is no method provided to write to
> EOOXML, only to MOOXML. Microsoft Office itself does not support
> EOOXML except as a one-way import communications protocol for MS
> Office; Microsoft Office does not treat it as a file format, only as
> a one-way communications protocol. There is no reference editor for
> EOOXML. MS Office users... can not save them as EOOXML.

Same question here. I have read your comment on zdnet oor whatever
that online magazine was, but are there other online sources for this?

> Is it technically possible to create a full-featured application
> that writes to that format? Yes, but there is no such product on the
> market, not even Microsoft's own.

This is true up to MS Office 2007, right? Are there any official
statements from MS as to when they will release such a version of MS
Office?
 
> While there is other significant functionality present in MOOXML but
> missing from the EOOXML specification, none sweeps so broadly on the
> question you pose as the markup for the new Microsoft line of
> business applications.

Meaning that "EOOXML files are interchangeable only among applications
which can talk to a MS Sharepoint server"? (even when there will be
one or more EOOXML editors)

> The unvarnished truth is that ODF is Sun Microsystem's vendor
> lock-in format.  ODF does not even enable round-trip non-lossy
> interoperability among ODF apps.

This confirms the feeling I expressed here more than one year ago that
ODF is just the first, albeit mandatory, piece of broader solution,
see the OpenFile concept I mentioned in my other reply:

http://robertogaloppini.net/2007/04/01/file-format-hidden-traps-in-opendocument-or-any-other-open-standard-and-how-to-avoid-them/

> This is another issue I have been raising on the TC

and the result was, if I may ask?

> I think the way forward for ODF advocates is to push for
> harmonization with MOOXML -- not EOOXML -- using ODF as the
> vocabulary for the shared functionality and Microsoft's proprietary
> stuff in a separate namespace... Here is Bray's suggestion repeated:
> "The ideal outcome would be a common shared office-XML dialect for
> the basics and it should be ODF (or a subset), since that's been
> designed and debugged... And, for the basic stuff that everybody
> uses, there'd be only one set of tags.

This looks to me as the OpenFile concept again, or a way to implement
it. What do you think?

	Marco

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