[odf-discuss] Response from a GNOME Foundation board director

[Daniel Carrera]

--- jody at gnome.org wrote:
> Our (Gnumeric developers) perspective is that we are a neutral third
> party, and both specs have made our lives unpleasant.  Each has it's
> own irritations and benefits.  Neither is going to be 'perfected'
> into being the one true office format as far as I can tell.

Well, no such format can exist. And if you try to make a format that is all things for all people you end up with TIFF. With that said, have you considered extending ODF with features that Gnumeric has but OOo lacks? ODF allows extension, and OOo can hardly complain since they extend it too.


> These formats are the file formats of their native
> applications.

Well... ODF doesn't have crap like LineSpacingLikeStarOffice="1"

Yes, ODF is based on OOo's view of the world (e.g. frame based vs page based) but IMO it is far more generic than OOXML. ODF seems to borrow more from HTML and other existing standards than from OOo itself.


> Unfortunately, the addition of the wonderful new Formula spec in ODF
> 1.2 actually drives the final nail into the interoperability coffin.
> It is a beautiful piece of work but it is intentionally different
> enough from XL that MS could never store content without loss unless
> they shattered the utility of ODF and put things in their own
> name-space.

Would you rather the Formula spec simply copy whatever Excel does even if it's wrong or inconsistent? Should we force applications to say that 1900 is a leap year although it isn't because many years ago a Microsoft programmer got it wrong? A moment ago you were complaining about ODF and OOXML being application specific. I am glad that the new formula spec is not application specific and tries to define formulas the way they ought to be.

>  f="xl:SUM("1")"
> It would be valid ODF 1.1, and possibly even 1.2 depending on how
> the lawyers parse things.  Early versions of OO.o would not be able
> to read it, and the newer variants that helpfully ignore the
> internal name-space entirely would calculate different results.

Let OOo do it wrong then. Have Gnumeric do it right, and MS Office users will migrate to Gnumeric instead of OOo.

Cheers,
Daniel.