[odf-discuss] Microsoft wins prize for "Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization"

[Peter Vandenabeele]

On 10/2/07, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
...
>It
> is error to portray ODF as a set of formats designed for interoperability.
> It is not.

An interesting discussion developed near the end of the session where certain
participants (including myself) argued that we should strive for better interop
between the different applications. In my vision that means catering also for
those customers that want _less_ features, namely only the features that are
supported on all the applications that they want to interoperate.That means
defining a subset of ODF. For clarity, this is a pure SUBset, where each
and every feature is defined in the spec, but some features are intentionally
not used.

The next question then is, for which applications that subset should be defined.
Amongst a certain group, a consensus developed that (now that Microsoft is
still dominant in the market of "Office" applications), we should
strive for better
interop with that dominant player.The solution I and some others defended was
the (existing) idea to define (formally inside the standard or
informally outside
of the ODF standard) an interop subset that would interoperate better with
Microsoft Office + Sun plug-in application combo. The next step then is for
the ODF processing applications to have a flag by which the ODF processing
application is set in "MS Office interop mode" so that it disallows
features that
are outside of this interop subset.

Obviously I respect that other customers of ODF processing applications will
want to have maximum feature sets, or even their own company specific
extensions. But the solution I defended at the ODF Camp is that at least
those customers for which interop is more important then maximum feature
set get a solution.

For clarity, I repeat that I do not believe that _adding_ extra unspecified
"dark matter" to the ODF file is the solution. The solution is to _subtract_
from the ODF file those 5 or 10% percentage of constructs that are
accidentally difficult to implement in the current market leading Office
application. In parallel, ODF processing applications can develop as much
extra and new features as they like but preferably those can be turned off
at the choice of the customer.

Let the customer chose between optimal interop or maximum feature sets.

HTH,

Peter