December 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 [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

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, [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

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, [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]