[odf-discuss] ECMA Disposition on OOXML implementation

[marbux]

On Jan 18, 2008 9:22 AM, Russell Ossendryver <worldlabel at gmail.com> wrote:

> The ECMA disposition is referencing these implementations:
>
>
xx--snip--xx

> Mindjet (MindManager),
>

xx--snip--xx


>
> If anyone has information on how each application is implementing OOXML,
> it would be apprecaited if you could advise.
>
>

According to Microsoft's Doug Mahugh, the MindJet app's interop with MS
Office is dependent on MS Office features other than OOXML.

"In order to accomplish this ambitious goal, they had to take advantage of
many aspects of the Open XML file formats and also some related Microsoft
technologies such as ribbon extensibility and VBA macros."

<http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2006/09/16/758090.aspx> There's a bit
more detail in the article.

Microsoft really publicized Mindjet because it was first out the door with
"kind of" OOXML support. But the Mahugh article in effect says it's
application-level interop with MS Office proprietary API dependencies that
can't be used by FOSS developers and a further dependency on a custom XSL
schema that gets modified by the scripts in Office before the return leg of
the round trip. So it really sounds as though OOXML is being used more as a
container than the OOXML markup for formatting is being used.

Mindjet's app apparently can't round-trip data with other OOXML
implementations, at least without further application-level interop
development  It's hardly a testimonial to the interop enabled by DIS-29500.
It's an application-level hack with MS Office dependencies.

As Mahugh said, "[t]his is a great example of a creative application of Open
XML that we never envisioned." I.e., DIS-29500 wasn't designed with this
kind of implementation in mind. And it shows in the description of how the
Mindjet interop was established.
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