Study Says OOXML Unsuitable For Norwegian Government 145
Posted
by
kdawson
from the party-like-it's-1997 dept.
from the party-like-it's-1997 dept.
angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML.)"
Re:What's in a name (Score:2, Informative)
It isn't OOXML.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's in a name (Score:4, Informative)
Incorrect. Section after section of the OOXML spec give insufficient information for implementation.
Don't forget, MS is not locked out (Score:4, Informative)
MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1] So, if ODF is chosen as the standard in Norway, the Norwegian government is still free to buy copies of Microsoft Office, as long as it can do a good job of reading and writing ODF files.
Of course, Microsoft will still view this as some kind of defeat, because they would prefer their own standard be adopted; OOXML will be just as much of a lockin trap as the older binary Microsoft formats. If OOXML is adopted, everyone has to buy Microsoft Office; if ODF is adopted, everyone can choose from among many alternatives, several of which are completely free.
It is obvious why Microsoft would prefer OOXML adoption for government (and everywhere else). It is less obvious why government should adopt OOXML instead of ODF.
[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972 [groklaw.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software [wikipedia.org]
steveha
Re:What's in a name (Score:4, Informative)
To cut a long story short http://news.cnet.com/Office-2007-fails-OOXML-conformance-test/2100-7344_3-6237855.html [cnet.com], M$ Office fails it's own standards test, so as regards the monopoly office application the standard is obviously not standard to anything, even within it's own purpose designed program suite. I suppose for that you have to buy the next upgrade or even perhaps the one after that etc. etc..
For M$ to adhere to ODF is simply a choice, for others to adhere to OOXML represents high risk of patent infringement, licence fees, of the standard saying one thing whilst their program does another, ensuring all competitors will never end up being totally compatible and remain a bit buggy.
Re:Office 2007 is not OOXML compliant (Score:3, Informative)
The change that made ECMA-376 non-compliant was allowing booleans to only have the value sof "true" and "false" rather than also allowing "on" and "off". A boneheaded change especially considering it was made to the portion of the standard intended to make legacy documents also ISO compliant...
Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)
Were you not around when Microsoft bribed and stacked the ISO meetings when voting for OOXML as a "standard"? Not only that, but it doesn't pass any kind of rigorous review as a standard... it is all but an XML representation of the original .doc format, just re-jiggered around, and is so convoluted that nobody but Microsoft has a hope of actually interoperating with it properly. And by the time someone might do so, they've got the next version out.
Seriously, just google around a bit:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/norwegian-standards-body-implodes-over-ooxml-controversy.ars [arstechnica.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML [wikipedia.org]
Re:And? (Score:3, Informative)
because it is used by the most popular office application out there
Really?! At the time OOXML was approved as a "standard", no conforming implementation existed. Microsoft expressed an intention of implementing it at some point in the future, but AFAIK they haven't yet done so. They also announced that they'd be supporting import/export of ODF before they supported OOXML. Have they changed this?
Re:Parent = FUD (Score:3, Informative)
Except that not even Microsoft was able to write an OOXML-spec document writer. So no, it does not have everything necessary to implement it.
Re:What's in a name (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's in a name (Score:5, Informative)
Check out http://noooxml.wdfiles.com/local--files/arguments/TheCaseAgainstOOXML.pdf [wdfiles.com] for an interesting breakdown of the problems with MS OOXML.
For example one setting is defined as "useWord97LineBreakRules"
The standard defines implementing this thusly:
“To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that
application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into
narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior,
they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications.”
I'll leave describing why this makes fully implementing the "standard" as an excercise to the reader!
MS OOXML: the white elephant on the menu (Score:3, Informative)
Correct.
MS' OOXML file format is different from the ISO/IEC 29500 OOXML file format that MS bought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooxml#Application_support [wikipedia.org]
MS will either have to change Office or buy yet another ISO standard to have a product that creates ISO compliant files!
For now, when you go for MS' lunch special, it's a white elephant on the menu.