February 2007 – Page 3

Lawrence Lessig called it email bankruptcy: when you have so many unanswered emails in your inbox that you decide to make a clean start and just admit to yourself, and to those who wrote, that you are not going to respond.

I have a related problem, interesting links I’ve collected and have meaning to blog about. But my links have accumulated far faster than I have been able to write about them. So I am declaring “link bankruptcy”. Here is my fire sale, a set of interesting topics for only pennies on the dollar:

Glyn Moody has the story about how platform dependencies has impacted one notable British institution.
Even more startling results in Korea, as reported in The Cost of Monoculture and the Korean Saga.
It is mainly in Polish, but some in English. More coverage of Open Standards in a new blog from Jacek Łęgiewicz.
In case you missed it the first time around, here is a wonderful essay by Dan Bricklin on “Software that Lasts 200 Years“. It made me think of what ramifications this has for file formats that aspire to longevity as well.
This looks interesting. A free OpenOffice Calc add-in for doing “fuzzy math” in OpenOffice.
Sweave adds ODF support to the open source R statistical analysis and graphing platform.
Docvert, an online REST service for converting Microsoft Word documents into ODF format.
I know someone was asking for this a few months ago — A Microsoft Works import filter for OpenOffice.
Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) allows bulk conversions of legacy Office binary documents to OOXML. Does anyone have something similar for ODF? Not just bulk conversion, but detection and reporting of possible conversion problems as well.
The eXtensibility Manifesto has some good schema design advice, including: #3 “Design of a data model focuses on all stakeholders’ requirements for the data.” #6 “Designs or components are not reinvented, but rather are leveraged where possible.”
“[Expert Witness] Alepin…alleged that the company [Microsoft]had subverted developers who used Microsoft’s version of Java ‘thinking they were developing multi-platform applications, but were actually developing Windows-specific applications’ “. From PC Pro News.
The Case For ODF — a recent presentation from OpenOffice Community Manager Louis Suarez-Potts.
“Office 2007 lacks some features of earlier versions of Office, and so it can’t fully support some Office files created in earlier versions. For example, Word 2007 cannot open Word files that contain multiple document versions, a feature supported by Word prior to Word 2007”. Anyone know what else is missing? From Directions on Microsoft.
A few months old — European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs. Does anyone know how this has turned out?
Dashed Lines and their uses.
David Berlind over at ZDNet: “To me, Ecma is not a standards body. As evidenced by the DVD situation (which is ridiculous if you ask me), it’s little more than a puppet with a pipeline through which vendors can pump their proprietary technologies into the ISO standardization process (avoiding the rigor that should normally be applied to anything up for consideratoin as an ISO standard). As such, the ISO is sort of a joke too.”
“One trouble spot we encountered using Vista’s Explorer metadata organization tools was the lack of support for some of the file types we commonly use. For instance, JPEG files happily take attributes under Vista, but PNG files do not. Along similar lines, Vista would not apply metadata to files we had created in the OpenOffice.org format. And, strangely, our attempts to apply metadata to documents created in OpenOffice.org—in Microsoft Office format—were greeted with an error message.” From eWeek.
What is a standard, according to David Rudin, Microsoft’s official Standards Attorney? “A technical specification that enables interoperability between different products and services and is either 1) intended for widespread industry adoption or 2) has achieved wide spread industry adoption.” This is a nice write-up.

ODF 1.1 is now officially approved as an OASIS Standard in a ballot which ended Wednesday. Accessibility Subcommittee Co-Chair Peter Korn breaks the story.

I played but a bit role in this story, though I watched it unfold with amazement. It was late 2005. A colleague mentioned that there were rumblings of concern in Massachusetts about their recent decision to move to ODF and what impact that would have on persons with disabilities. Although I am not an accessibility expert, I know the basics. (Every programmer should know the basics of accessibility, as well as the basics of internationalization, typography, human factors, performance, security, law, technical writing, project management and how to present and receive business cards in Asia).

Initially, I suggested that a file format has no relevance at all for accessibility. After all, the hard part of accessibility, the integration with screen readers was all at the application and operating system level. What difference could a file format make? The file format is not even involved except when loading or saving the document, right? But since knew ODF, I offered to do a quick spot check and report back. It wasn’t long before I was able to demonstrate a handful of places where data necessary to enable accessibility was not described in the existing specification. For example, although an imported image allowed an annotation of alternate text for use by screen readers, an OLE embedding did not.

To err is human, but what happened next was extraordinary. There is a natural tendency to shrink away from criticism, to retreat inward and retrench, and at all costs avoid admitting errors. But I personally believe that every time we are corrected or criticized, it gives us another opportunity to show our character by how we handle it. The unchallenged person may be a gentleman or a scoundrel. You do not know until he is under pressure. So it is notable that the OASIS ODF TC overcame its accessibility problems not with defiance and not with acquiescence, but by enthusiastically embracing the challenge, engaging the critics, including the aggrieved community, bringing in the experts, both from OASIS member companies as well as outside invited experts, and working within an open and transparent standards development process, rolled up its sleeves and got to work.

The OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee first met on January 27th, 2006. They delivered their evaluation report on ODF accessibility in June of 2006, followed by contributions to the ODF 1.1 specification which was approved as an OASIS Committee Specification in October, 2006, and just this week was approved by the OASIS membership as an OASIS Standard. This took a few days over a year, start to finish.

This is what open standards are all about and why they are so damn important. It isn’t just about patents and lawyers, though that is certainly part of it. It isn’t just about getting your specification approved by ISO, though that is certainly part of it. It isn’t just about how little you can do to earn the label of “open standard”. It is about how much we can do together to improve some parts of the technological landscape that are broken today for some users, and have been for some time.

Congratulations are due the members of the Accessibility Subcommittee for their diligent efforts. But we haven’t heard the last from them. Their charter calls for them to continue their good work, to make additional accessibility improvements to ODF, look at new dimensions of accessibility, consider a wider range of disabilities and create a guide for ODF implementors on the best practices for implementing the accessibility feature of the ODF standard.

I look forward to their contributions to ODF 1.2 and beyond!

Archives for February 2007

Declaring Bankruptcy

Introducing ODF 1.1