O'Reilly News & Commentary

Experiments with numbering and horizontal rule in AbiWord - Grumpy old guy thinks word processing was better 15 years ago

By Rick Jelliffe
September 1, 2009

I loathe making documents with numbered headings or any kind of definite design in Word Processors. I find numbered headings and lists annoying in Word at best, maddening in Open Office at worst, so I have been using AbiWord today. If you want to take a design-driven approach, then most Word Processors just suck. AbiWord is a non-nonsense, calm-feeling free WP not targeted at very large documents. It has a native XML format pretty simple for transformations into and out of, and basic ODF and OOXML import/export.

Simplistic conversion from word proccessor formats to plain text is unsafe - OOXML, ODF, HTML

By Rick Jelliffe
August 19, 2009

There are a number of ways in which text can be introduced, changed or disappeared, though each format will have a different mix of possibilities.

Microsoft and the two XML patents

By Rick Jelliffe
August 14, 2009

Microsoft has been in the news in the last month in relation to two patents, one it received and one it has been ordered to pay $200 million in damages for infringing. I've been looking through both, and the patents seem to bear little resembles to their reports.

Mircrosoft and the two XML patents #2 - More on the I4i patent for Word's custom XML

By Rick Jelliffe
August 14, 2009

Here is a better overview of the i4i patent.

Should OOXML be a national standard? - Strict OOXML: probably not; Transitional OOXML: surely not?

By Rick Jelliffe
August 11, 2009

There is no inconsistency in ajudging that a particular technology would be usefully written up as an international standard but yet not appropriate for a national standard.

Microsoft's proposed resolution to EU on competition

By Rick Jelliffe
July 28, 2009

Andy Updegrove has a worthwhile article up Parsing the Microsoft - EU Interoperability Commitment. As far as I can read it, Microsoft is now promising to, among other things: release things it has already released, and follow the relevant standards, except where it doesn't. There were some other parts of the Microsoft proposal that caught my eye, as being pretty positive. I like the clearer and more objectively verifiable commitments.

Documents as miniature websites? - Plus: Legislation needed to protect and promote FOSS

By Rick Jelliffe
July 23, 2009

The most likely future for documents and their formats, is that each document will start to look/act/be implemented more and more like a tiny, self-contained website. There is a flip-side: as documents become more like tiny websites, the desktop application will become more become more like a browser with an internal web-server.

Groklaw is on-message - Beautiful unanimity

By Rick Jelliffe
June 15, 2009

Waiting on this wintery Sydney day for my flatmate's Chinese roast pork knuckle with bamboo to cook, I thought I'd check up on a suspicion that had formed in my mind: had Growlaw ever published anything on OOXML/ODF recently that was not just Big Blue's message of the week?

Supporting degradation: towards a workable Open Packaging standard - How Namespace Relations could allow better fallback and graceful degradation

By Rick Jelliffe
June 1, 2009

I think we are missing, or have now arrived at the stage where we need, a way to declare relationships between different namespaces in standard XML documents. This needs to be part of a broadly-based open packaging standard.

Classes of Fidelity for Document Applications

By Rick Jelliffe
May 28, 2009

In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come...

Where everyone knows your name: ODF 1.1 formula support in Office SP2

By Rick Jelliffe
May 8, 2009

Aslightly interesting standards aspect to the ODF 1.1 interoperability problems that MS Office SP2 is caught up in. To my mind either the problem is in the short term only and intrinsic to the ODF feature, or the problem does not lie with Microsoft for making their choice, nor with other implementers for making their choices, but with the ratty choice of markup used for this feature in ODF 1.n itself.

SmartArt and OpenOffice.oo

By Rick Jelliffe
May 6, 2009

I was happy to see Thorsten Behrens' blog entry SmartArt Import and More. Thorsten works on the graphics engine for OpenOffice's presentation application Impress.

The big fish swallow the little fish: Adobe's FXG and MicroSoft's OOXML

By Rick Jelliffe
May 6, 2009

Adobe's FXG seems to be to PSD what OOXML is to .DOC: a re-factoring of a middle-aged binary format in XML with a focus on fidelity rather than elegance. My working model is that we need to think of the de-proprietarization of market-dominating technologies in the intensely pragmatic model of a sequence of bigger fish swallowing smaller fish: a sequence of consolidation of dialects, modularization of parts, then adoption into pluralistic frameworks and Adaptability Standards, allowing user selection of winning mini-technologies. Each stage of which will take at least a major software release cycle.

Blue Sun? What an IBM acquisition of Sun means for software

By Kurt Cagle
March 24, 2009

However, Sun's software side of the acquisition ledger, especially by IBM, has been rather oddly overlooked, given that it will likely have major implications for software development and cloud computing for years. Sun's software holdings cover five primary areas - Java, Solaris, mySQL, Open Office, and Sun's recently acquired QLayer cloud infrastructure. Understanding how IBM could potentially ramp up (or destroy) each of these gives some interesting insight into the real value of IBM's potential software acquisitions.

Document security and macros

By Rick Jelliffe
February 26, 2009

One of the big selling points of descriptive markup is that it is safe. If you use a binary format (or a macro-enabled file) you can have a security problems. I think ODF needs to take a leaf out of OOXML's book here, and at least adopt the convention where the normal extensions must be opened by conforming applications with macro- and script- and event- disabled. Security is so important, that it should be part of ODF 1.2 rather than a next-generation ODF issue.

Safe Plurality: Can it be done using OOXML's Markup Compatibility and Extensions mechanism?

By Rick Jelliffe
February 13, 2009

The particular issue that MCE address is this: what is an application supposed to do when it finds some markup it wasn't programmed to accept? This could be extension elements in some foreign namespace, but it could also be some elements from a known namespace: the case when a document was made against a newer version of the standard than the application.

Packaging formats of famous application/*+zip

By Rick Jelliffe
January 10, 2009

Here is a little table showing some of the characteristics of the various packaging formats used by modern XML-in-ZIP applications. ... To me, this is the only feasible route to format convergence: getting agreement on what almost everyone already supports (the low-hanging fruit), neutralizing any gratuitous limitations where there are legitimate areas of difference (extensibility), and supporting alternatives as a practical mechanism for allowing market/bazaar forces to determine the viability of different vocabularies and subformats (plurality.)

ISO standard 'office' formats overpromise compatability?

By Rick Jelliffe
November 23, 2008

A friend in the industry who works with ODF gave me a heads-up about a new Gartner report, available on Microsoft's site which he describes as "delusional". Of the three pages, I pretty much agree with their first and third pages. Towards the middle it gets a little, err, nutty to me.

Fake real-time blog from JTC1 Meeting, Nara, Japan

By Rick Jelliffe
November 21, 2008

ISO/IEC JTC1 (the international standards body that looks after Information Technology standards) has just published two documents from its recent meetings in Nara, Japan. Along with the publication of IS29500 today, these represent a kind of line being drawn underneath the OOXML episode. JTC1 also addresses the "one standard" issue but needs to go further on reform of accelerated processes like the contentious "fast-track" submission.

OOXML standards finally published and available free!

By Rick Jelliffe
November 21, 2008

I am delighted to see that the free site for ISO publicly available standards finally has the OOXML standards available:

Fake real-time blog from Document Interoperability Initiative 2 at Redmond

By Rick Jelliffe
October 29, 2008

Can Microsoft's idea of "document archetypes" and "interoperable templates" be ramped up to provide a fresh new approach to both better document interoperability and better descriptive markup?

Trying to figure out where Open Formula fits in

By Rick Jelliffe
October 24, 2008

OpenFormula actually defines an exchange formula language which has explicit delimiters, but also allows (and partly defines) application-specific user interface languages, which allows spaces and other delimiters. An ODF spreadsheet that used IS29500 syntax when saved, even if it didn't follow full Open Formula, would not be conforming.

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either?

By Rick Jelliffe
October 22, 2008

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? I suggest that perhaps the looming challenge for document standards is not in deciding or developing perfect formats, but in integrating the packaged world of documents with the fragmented world of web resources. ...First, a potted history of the document format landscape over last 25 years...

Ken Krechmer's Adaptability Standards

By Rick Jelliffe
October 10, 2008

I think Ken Krechmer's Adaptive Standards pre-suppose the kind of frameworking and support for modularity and plurality that I have been banging on about for the last decade. An interesting recent quote from him.

How many mavericks does it take to change a lyspære?

By Rick Jelliffe
October 7, 2008

Thirteen members of the Norwegian standards body's technical committee walked out recently... If we take these 13, and subtract people who either work for competitors of Microsoft or affiliated with the NUUG/FOSS industry/community, we get...1 person (the esteemed Steve Pepper) by my count...

The state of the art?

By Rick Jelliffe
September 12, 2008

The problem is that the bottom line for document interoperability is not the format, but the feature match of the applications. The only way ever to get reliable, bottom-line interchange (enough fidelity that no semantics are lost, with graceful degradation) is by restricting feature use.

Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, the CONSEGI Declaration, and the Brazilian suppression

By Rick Jelliffe
September 11, 2008

I think that underneath the IT bigwigs' comments is the ghost of Plan A: an avoidance of responsibility by procurement or policy makers by invoking the authority of ISO as the reason why a standard should be adopted as a strategy to disentangle from Microsoft and go open source. However, since that was a dodgy proposition to start with (i.e. the invocation, not the disentangling), withdrawing it actually withdraws nothing.

The Education of Gary Edwards

By Rick Jelliffe
September 8, 2008

One of the more interesting characters in the recent standards battles has been Gary Edwards: he was a member of the original ODF TC in 2002 which oversaw the creation of ODF 1.0 in 2005, but gradually became more concerned about large vendor dominance of the ODF TC frustrating what he saw as critical improvements in the area of interoperability.

Is Office Suite Markup worth the trouble?

By Simon St. Laurent
August 14, 2008

In his Extreme "first person" talk yesterday, Patrick Durusau asked some of the right questions about the recent explosive battles over standardizing XML generated by Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. I can't share his conviction, though, that getting through this firefight...

The challenge of validating XML-in-ZIP file in place: how to do it with Schematron

By Rick Jelliffe
August 5, 2008

Thoughts on Schematron headers for processing ODF and OOXML, with a C# URL Resolver that handles ZIP files like some Java resolvers. The new XML-in-ZIP documents present a new challenge: constraints that formerly would have been kept in a single document are now split into multiple documents. When the basic information is kept in a single XML file, validation is reasonably straightforward.The current range of schema tools support these kinds of intra-document invariants quite well. But no document is an island, so Schematron also supports a range of intra-document constraints, but it may be time to enhance it to support the XML-in-ZIP issues better.

What are they so scared of?

By Rick Jelliffe
July 17, 2008

Why are these people so scared of openness? This may seem a strange and provocative thing to say. Surely ODF is the open technology and OOXML is the proprietary technology? Surely we know this because "ISO" is the organization which is just the puppet of MicroSoft while OASIS is a bastion of community openness!

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