2006

And then there were three…

December 27, 2006

ODF, OOXML and now, UOF. This story broke back in November, with some good coverage including: Andy Updegrove: Another Open Document Format – From China and More on China’s Uniform Office Format (and much more) Jeff Kaplan: Is China Pulling a Bill Gates on ODF? David Berlind: China’s own document standard: A clear message to [...]

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Got ODF?

December 21, 2006

Are you writing code that works with ODF? Open source, commercial, in-house, internationally distributed, written in Python, Java, Ruby, C++ or Haskell, a one person project or with a team of dozens — if it is done with ODF and is interesting, then I want to hear about it and help share your story. Here’s [...]

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A notable achievement

December 9, 2006

I believe congratulations are in order to Microsoft and Ecma’s TC45 for what appears to be a new world record for creating a standard. Their recently-approved Office Open XML (OOXML) standard weighed in at 6,456 pages yet took only 357 days to be reviewed, edited and approved, making it not only the largest markup specification, [...]

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How to Write a Standard (If You Must)

December 6, 2006

Standards are generally a bad idea. They reduce freedom-of-action and limit choice. But sometimes you must have one in order to pacify an anti-business regulator or other socialist-leaning bureaucrat. So what should you do if you find you find yourself in the awkward position of coming up short in the standards department? By all means, [...]

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The worm in the apple

December 5, 2006

Via CrunchGear, MacWorld UK, and APC Magazine — Mac Office users seem to have no way of reading the new OOXML files which Office 2007 for Windows writes by default. APC quotes a Microsoft Mac Business Unit spokeperson as saying, “Unfortunately it is still to early for us to say when the converters will be [...]

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Some short notes

December 3, 2006

I’ve updated the blog to use Google’s new “beta” Blogger software. I haven’t noticed any glitches, but please let me know if anything seems broken. They’ve updated their feed to support Atom 1.0 which is great. Previously they served up Atom 0.3 which I then updated to 1.0 via this mechanism. Also, the new Blogger [...]

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Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

November 27, 2006

Some interesting news, via Bob Sutor. Let’s take a closer look at the what is being offered as part of this “royalty free” deal from Microsoft. At first it appears like an early Christmas present from Microsoft, a royalty-free license to the Office UI for “software vendors who wish to incorporate the 2007 Microsoft Office [...]

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Happy Thanksgiving

November 22, 2006

1920 was the 300th anniversary of the landing at Plymouth of the Puritan separatists. In commemoration of this tercentenary, three stamps were issued based on designs by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s chief designer, Clair Aubrey Huston. Let’s take a closer look. The 1-cent green “Mayflower” (Scott #548) was based on a photograph of [...]

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Genesis 11:5-9

November 14, 2006

This, fresh from from Office Watch: “Office 2007 compatibility pack disappoints”. Update 11/15: Some readers have written with more information. This may be an issue between the pre-1.5-final-draft version of OOXML and the final RTM Compatibility Pack. Evidently there were some late changes to the OOXML specification, including a change in namespace URI’s. So the [...]

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Two simple questions

November 6, 2006

Some pertinent quotes from Microsoft’s Brian Jones, thematic quotes made over a sustained period of time: “The Open XML formats were designed to be 100% backward compatible with the existing set of Office binary formats, and that was really a goal that we can’t compromise on.” “It needs to be 100% full fidelity” “[F]rom our [...]

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