On 1 Aug 2014, at 2:42 pm, Rory O'Farrell <ofarr...@iol.ie> wrote:
For information:
http://www.themukt.com/2014/07/31/never-use-microsofts-ooxml-format/
An interesting article. This brings to mind a few issues I've been thinking
about for a while:
- I think the rather extreme anti-OOXML stance that some take can be
counterproductive. I certainly hold the view that ODF is a superior standard
in many respects (though not all), however there are circumstances where it
makes sense for a given piece of software to support both. For example they
cite the lack of support for ODF in Google Docs and iWork; if one wants to
develop software that will interoperate with these would require OOXML
support.
My take on the issue is that it's important to support both, because as much
as we might dislike the fact, OOXML is out there and used very widely. With
the work I'm currently doing on UX Write, I'm adding to the existing OOXML
(specifically .docx) support with support for for ODF (.odt) and doing this
in a common framework such that the app itself doesn't care which format the
file is natively stored in, it will work equally well with both.
Additionally, once I have the ODF support in, it will be possible to
leverage this support for conversion between the two formats in both
directions. I'll be giving a talk on this at ApacheCon EU later this year,
and yes this framework will soon be open source - if anyone is interested in
collaborating on it, please let me know.
- One of the criticisms raised is that there are several different versions
of OOXML, not all of which are entirely compatible. However this is also
true of ODF (or at least of MS's implementation in Office 2007 and 2010; I'm
not sure where the fault lies). One of the big questions I've been asking
myself in the work I'm currently on ODF is whether I should have my
implementation it save ODF 1.1 by default, or version 1.2 by default. If I
choose the former, it will work with Office 2007 and onwards. The latter,
only Office 2013 (I think). For someone such as myself writing a new
implementation of the (prat of) ODF spec, and desiring compatibility with
Office 2007 and 2010, which is the best choice?
- I consider the use of proprietary fonts to be a separate issue from the
standard itself. The specification is silent on the matter, so this is
really a criticism of MS Office rather than OOXML itself. Nonetheless, it's
an important one, and one I believe we should address by promoting the use
of open source fonts (e.g. https://www.google.com/fonts) independently and
in addition to the use of ODF. Perhaps these could be made available as an
easily-distributed separate package, so that those who want to stick with MS
Office for whatever reason could be encouraged to install & use them, for
improved interoperability with other office suites?
In an organisation where there are some users on MS and others on OO/LO,
these fonts could be deployed by the IT department as part of the standard
desktop image, and all templates created by the organisations could use
these fonts by default, which would lead to wider usage.
- Towards the end of the article, there's a discussion about the lack of
support for ODF by some vendors, particularly Google and Apple. The question
then is how do we fix that? My view is that there needs to be a migration
path - and by that I mean not just a tool to convert documents from OOMXL to
ODF, but the ability to go both ways, and work with either format for as
long as necessary for the migration to complete. Most (all?) successful
transitions I've seen have used a similar approach - Microsoft going from
DOS to Windows, Apple going from 68k -> PPC -> Intel, and Mac OS classic ->
OS X, and so forth.
In the case of document formats, for a country whose government currently
uses MS Office and OOXML that wants to make the switch to ODF and
OpenOffice/LibreOffice/other tools, it's not going to be an overnight
change. It could very well take several years, and during that period
everyone in the organisation will need to have the capability to work with
both formats. New or modified documents would in general be saved in ODF,
but older documents as well as documents that need to be exchanged with
people running MS Office 2007 or 2010 (which I think don't support ODF 1.2)
would need to be in OOXML, until such time as everyone has upgraded to a
fully-conformant version of MS Office, or switched to OpenOffice et al.
--
Dr. Peter M. Kelly
Founder, UX Productivity
pe...@uxproductivity.com
http://www.uxproductivity.com/
http://www.kellypmk.net/
PGP key: http://www.kellypmk.net/pgp-key
(fingerprint 5435 6718 59F0 DD1F BFA0 5E46 2523 BAA1 44AE 2966)
