[odf-discuss] OOXML - API and dll:s

[marbux]

On Jan 15, 2008 4:22 PM, Russell Ossendryver <worldlabel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi does anyone have information on the following. It would be appreciated
>
> a)  hidden APIs for OOXML and related stuff like migration tags are
> a given. What could all and possibilities of "hidden" stuff be?
>
>
See the last two entries on the Groklaw Comes v. Microsoft page, the expert
supplemental report of Andrew Schulman and his corresponding deposition. His
initial report and earlier deposition were not disclosed because Microsoft
settled the case the day before the judge was to rule on public disclosure
of a large amount of discovery materials.

Schulman had access to the Office 2007 source code and his report identifies
a host of undocumented APIs used by MS Office 2007. This is significant
because the injunction in U.S. v. Microsoft requires that Microsoft disclose
the APIs for all of its middleware. The Comes plaintiffs had earlier
obtained the court's permission to transmit all of their data on the
undocumented APIs to the U.S. Dept. of Justice. However, DoJ has taken no
public action in response.


>
> b) how many supporting applications for OOXML that rely on the dll:s and
> how many that do things natively?
>
>
I don't know the answer here, but I've only run across a very few, less than
can be counted on the fingers of both hands. I'd say it's a fairly safe bet
that there are more apps that have OOXML conversion filters than there are
that use OOXML as their native file formats. E.g., there are starting to be
a few Office 2.0 apps that can read or write to very simplified feature sets
of OOXML, but for the most part they use (X)HTML or other XML languages plus
CSS for their own data stores.

During the years that Microsoft kept their binary formats a moving
interoperability target, innumerable apps were built as MS Office add-ons,
using the documented Office and Windows APIs. These include both general
purpose and niche market apps. There are a ton of vertical market-specific
add-ons, many of them long-entrenched niche market leaders. For example,
there are literally hundreds of Word add-ons of various types for the law
office market, with solidly established market leaders.

To believe that any significant portion of that multitude of MS Office
add-on developers will bother to rewrite their apps just to read and write
OOXML natively is, in my opinion, naive. Those developers would have to
reproduce the entire feature set of a major office App such as Word in order
to achieve interoperability approximating that which they achieve with far
less effort using the Office APIs, which have been far more stable than the
Office file formats.

They would also have to trust Microsoft not to make substantial changes in
its file formats, a trust unwarranted by Microsoft's historical behavior and
further belied by Microsoft's expressed willingness to change OOXML in
response to NB comments.

As Microsoft's Doug Mahugh reportedly said:

"Well, its too early for other vendors to commit to this file format. After
the BRM (Ballot Resolution Meeting - in February 2008) there may be changes
to it, so it is risky, and may not make commercial sense to implement
OpenXML as it is at the moment."

<http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/09/microsoft-tech-.html>.

I expect most of the uptake among developers of apps that use OOXML natively
(whatever OOXML may turn out to be post-BRM) will be limited largely to
those developing new apps and in-house developers who need MS
Office-compatible XML to work with in developing business process scripts.
In other words, post-processors for OOXML generated by MS Office. But
Microsoft is moving into that space too with, e.g., Sharepoint, which has
its own set of proprietary APIs for add-ons.

Anyway, good luck on the undocumented API research. I put 300+ hours into
scouring the Microsoft site for related vocabulary and trying to find
corresponding metadata in the Ecma 376 spec. I didn't find any worthy of
mention, just a single Sharepoint tag.

But the Foundation developers did spot a consistent concurrent transmission
of data paralelling that of OOXML between MS Word and Sharepoint, using what
looked like the binary FrontPage protocol. That might be a relevant clue.

Best regards,

Marbux
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