Petar Tahchiev's Blog

OOXML Objections And Sun's Position About It

I just found a really interesting discussion going on in Bulgarian open-source communities about the Microsoft's OOXML format and the fact that it was approved by some national committees.

So I would like to present here to you some thoughts on this "specification" and ask if someone heard what is the official Sun's position on this. So the history goes in very brief like this: on first of February OASIS published the 1.1 version of the ODF specifications and recognized it as a worldwide standard. Right now, what is currently happening is that Microsoft are trying to make another standard: Microsoft Open XML (OOXML), or ISO/IEC 29500. On one hand the ODF format was created with the idea of a complete independence of the application that uses it, the Microsoft format has some requirements that only the Microsoft Office applications can provide. Further enough there are some really strong arguments against the Microsoft standard, some of which are: no need of a second standard, OOXML is not even implemented already, the given specification is not complete, more than 10 percent of the examples given cannot be validated as a standard XML, the whole "specification proposal" is more than 6000 pages and misuses terms like "open" and "standard".... (and many others).

In spite of these objections many of the national committees, that have the right to vote for the proposal, voted "for" the proposal.

Now my question is: what is the official opinion of Sun about Microsoft's proposal? Also, if the new proposal is accepted as a specification will it be supported in the OpenOffice, and will we have an OOXML filter?

Some links that might be interesting to you:
http://www.noooxml.org/
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
http://linux-bg.org/cgi-bin/y/index.pl?page=news&key=395779536(in Bulgarian)

Comments

• 
  Can you give us a paragraph on what OOXML is for? If it's something that supports the C# .net community, it's probably harmless as an offical standard. But I don't know what questions to ask. "How long can it sit in the refrigerator before it goes bad?"

  Thanks,

  Dave
  

  Posted by: dwalend on October 18, 2007 at 05:34 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.