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Open Office Wars, part 2

It is kinda cool to wake up to find comments from both Microsoft and OpenOffice on my blog.  I've followed the links provided by both Dare and Nick, and but this seems to only reinforce my earlier impressions.

It looks to me like the Open Office format is too closed, and the Microsoft Office 11 direction is too open.

Looking at the DTDs for Open Office, I see a well thought out set of definitions that build upon prior art like Dublin Core and SVG.  This is all goodness.  I may have missed it, but I don't see any provisions for additional user or tool specific elements.  Expect More.

Looking at how Office 11 will support XML, the sales pitch seems to me to be of the form "pick my browser because it supports Unicode".  That's nice, but does it fully support CSS level 2, a specific application of Unicode?  Ubiquitous higher level open and interoperable standards are important too.

FWIW, my recommendation to the OASIS TC is to define this standard using XML schema.  Feel free to support other schema standards, just make sure that you support the XML schema definition in a first class way.

Again, FWIW, my recommentation to the Microsoft Office team is to read and write documents that conform to the XSDs that will be defined by OASIS.  Feel free to support other schemas, just make sure that you support the OASIS defined schemas in a first class way.

All this is just my humble opinion.  I am not under any illusions that I have any real "pull" in either of these efforts.

Cool, I'll pass this on to the guys on dev@xml.

Posted by Nick at

Microsoft says that if the Open Office schema developed by the OASIS TC is an XSD, it'll work in Office 11.

If it does work out of the box, it will be very ugly. Extensive customisation will be required before an OO XML doc can be edited by end users.

For example, if the OO XML had an element <outline-style>, what sort of code is required to interact with this in the same way that the equivalent Word feature would be used? Is it even possible?

Another example would be handling the styles, if they are stored separately from the content. The current sxw format does this, and work would be required if Word 11 is to read and write them.

Posted by Jason at

Jason, that's actually the point as it focuses the discussion on the real issues.

Contrast that to the headlines you see today. And, who knows, perhaps MS will surprise you.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

Open Office Wars, part 3

Simon St. Laurent: I still think there are two sides to this story. On one side, the ability of MS tools to adapt to formats that users can describe will be an incredible step forward. On the other hand, this doesn't explain an unwillingness to ... [more]

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