July 2006

Throwing stones at people in glass houses

July 27, 2006

I work in a house with glass walls. Not literally, of course. The cost to air-condition such a house would be prohibitive. I mean that working on standard in OASIS is a public act, with process transparency and public visibility. The public doesn’t see merely the end-product, or quarterly drafts, they can see (if they [...]

9 comments Read the full article →

Add-in finitum

July 26, 2006

In this post, I will take another look at the Microsoft ODF Add-in debate, suggest some criteria for use in evaluating file format integration, and use those criteria to evaluate both Office 2007′s support for the ODF formats, and OpenOffice’s support for Microsoft’s formats. My examination of the ODF Add-in for Word (here and here) [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

VML and OOXML: Cum mortuis in lingua mortua

July 24, 2006

In this post, I will look at the history of Vector Markup Language (VML), how it lost out to the W3C’s SVG back in the 1990′s, but has come back from the dead, showing up in the draft Ecma Office Open XML (OOXML) specification. I offer some opinions on why this is a bad thing. [...]

7 comments Read the full article →

Site Updates

July 24, 2006

If I had know I was going to be Groklaw’ed, I would have spruced up the place first and prepared for company! Thanks to all for the overwhelming expression of interest in these topics. This blog is generated by Blogger, and published via ftp to my site. This blog is still quite young and you [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

A Game of Zendo

July 18, 2006

It is the type of response that was crafted to end all debate and justify all sins: “Backward compatibility with billions of documents produced over decades”. Variations of this occur everywhere. Rather than cite them all, a simple Google query will bring up a representative sample. Let’s take a deeper look at this argument. There [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

Lost in Translation

July 14, 2006

In the last installment I looked at the way the ODF Add-in for Word 2007 integrates into the Word UI. Now let’s drill down into an actual conversion and see what fidelity we get. I downloaded the code from SourceForce and installed on a machine running the Office 2007 beta 2. The Add-in pre-reqs the [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

Traduttore, Traditore

July 13, 2006

Brian Jones in his blog entry of 11 July 2006, comments on their recently announced ODF Translator: It’s directly exposed in the UI. We’re even going to make it really easy to initially discover the download. We already need to do this for XPS and PDF, so we’ll also do it for ODF. There will [...]