Star/OpenOffice XML Format To Become ISO Standard?

Emil Brink writes "According to this entry in XML spec co-author Tim Bray's excellent blog, the European Commission has formally asked Sun to make the XML file format used in OpenOffice.org into a true ISO standard. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "

Yeah, right.

Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office.

Right, because all those office workers are going to think "Oh God, we're using non-standard XML?!"

Call me a pessimist, but having a non Microsoft standard isn't going to matter much, what with Microsoft being able to make its own standard.

Besides, how many times have you heard office workers say "Oh God, IE doesn't support CSS properly or render transparent PNGs?!"

OASIS standard too?

There exists a technical committee at OASIS [oasis-open.org] to make the OpenOffice format a standard (OASIS OpenOffice) [oasis-open.org]. How does this differ if it's a ISO standard as well?

Won't help the Microsoft addled read text files

I send out flat text files to co-workers, and they complain that they cannot open them because they don't have the appropriate reader on their (Microsoft) E-mail system. Yes, I know that notepad and Word and probably other applications can "open" a text file, but none of the defaults are set to do this automagically.

If it's an ISO standard it won't do a damn bit of good until the Microsoft OS's and Microsoft mail system and Microsoft Applications all know to do the right thing. Whad'ya think the chances of Microsoft cooperating are?

Government mandate is the only way

Contrast this issue with that of the adoptation of IPV6. The ONLY way we will ever see IPV6 adoption is through a government mandate. IPV4 has way too much "inertia" for anything to supplant it. The same can be said of office applications. Try submitting your resume in anything but .txt or .doc (MS Word) format. NOBODY will be able to read it, believe me I tried sending mine in .pdf format and was told to "please send it in word". Once companies wishing to sell software to government are forced to support a common (and open) format then perhaps people will actually be able to choose the word processor they will use, otherwise they are locked in to what ever the dominate product (and it's proprietary format) are at the time.

Cheers,
_GP_

OOo Reader App!

I've said it once and I'll say it again... what OpenOffice.org needs is a lean-mean OOo Reader Application! By that, I mean not having to download an 80mb installer with everything but the kitchen sink, but maybe a small 2mb or less reader that uses standard widgets (MFC, GTK, etc.) to make the app smaller and faster. I've gotten a friend interested in actually looking at OOo code to make a no-nonsense reader, but due to lack of time, he can't start any open source projects.

A reader app is all we need! Email a .sxw as an attachment to a friend. If he/she has broadband, point them to where to download the app. If not, maybe go over to their place and install it for them. If in another country, get them to download from someone who has broadband, snail mail them an installer CD with the reader and the full OOo app, or pester someone like IBM to include the said reader application with their desktops and laptops. See! I can already imagine the possibilities. If only I can program... I would be willing to test and help promote this stuff (preinstall on all PCs we sell).

Re:Why would this lure them away?

Yeah, StarOffice/OO are open-source and free but they don't have the features that Word does.

Which features?

And how many people actually use those features?

Re:Why would this lure them away?

And how many people actually use those features?

Enough use individual features that it makes it impossible (or difficult) for those users to switch away. Each niche feature may only appeal to a small % of users, but taken collectively, there are a much larger number of those users who depend on those features too much to move away.

Additionally, it's not even about features for many people - it's about compatibility. Many of my family members use MSOffice at their offices and won't switch because the cost of converting and testing their Excel macros is too much to justify the conversion. And that's being generous assuming that 100% of what needs to be achieved in Excel via macros *could* be accomplished via StarBasic or whatever it's called in ooo.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

Excel, graphing. I'm a linux user and for chem. labs we had to plot data sets for our weekly lab reports. Using Excel this was a trivial task which required absolutely no knowledge of the inner workings of the spreadsheet to produce really nice looking reports.
In Linux I tried Gnumeric (nice and coming along fast, but still not even up to par) and OpenOffice (not even close).
And no, it had nothing to do with "being familar with the Excel way". I'd never needed to perform spreadsheet tasks before...it took me quite a while of reading docs to figure out how to even do a linear regression that looked nice in the GNU alternatives whereas it's a matter of 2 clicks of the mouse in Excel.

Your preaching to the choir when it comes to me and open source, but MS has the best office suite around............period.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

I spend the majority of my "working time" on the computer word processing, and I actually prefer OO.o. Particularly because of it's UI (for example, double-space is two clicks, not six). And I can create my own outline, thank you very much. Better that way, too, since it gets you to think about what you've written rather than just pressing a button.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

I know it's early monday morning but...

People don't just use Office because they are forced into it.

And then...

People use MSFT because they are already locked in.

Preview button, people!

As a web developer, I would prefer the XML document format to Word's format particularly because I can use different XSLT to display the data, meaning our clients would have greater control over their web sites without having to contact us for a lot of the changes. Just FTP the document to a specific directory and PHP can parse it out into a live page in a few minutes.

-1 Wrong

This is totally stupid. OO.org formats already support embedded images. The OO.org format is actually a tar.gz that can contain many files, including XML documents and PNG images.

If it is a vector image they can just use SVG, which is XML.

If it is a raster image they just use PNG and embed the dile

Do you really know that little about OO formats or is this a joke?

Re:Why would this lure them away?

I don't believe in your arguement. If there is an alternative standard, people could switch to say, abiword, knowing that they can easily move their documents to OpenOffice.org if it doesn't do all they want. It is also an iterative process. The software will become better developed once it is picks up a larger user base.

An established standard will force microsoft to at least read it, though perhaps not write to it. I think that it would open a world of choice.

It would be more like Linux distros. You can have a bunch of them, all competing, but they are standard enough to be interchangeable without a complete change in business practice.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

Well, it depends on what happens afterwards. Government bodies usually request all electronic documents given to them to be in a standard format. If there actually WOULD be an ISO norm format for office documents, you can bet that government agencies (and large companies that exchange documents with them) will want to use such a format.
This could possibly even force MS hand into complying with this format (or at least offer REALLY good import/export filters for these formats).

Re:Why would this lure them away?

The main thing that stops me using OpenOffice is its poor interoperability with MS Office. Perhaps the European Union can twist Microsoft's arm to release details of MS Office file formats? This, above all else, would help to boost the number of OpenOffice users.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

Why would it lure people from Microsoft? People don't just use Office because they are forced into it.

This, of course isn't true in case of people who must use Office because it's a part of their corporate desktop standard.

People who actually create the standards like having buzzwords like "ISO standard" and "XML" somehow connected to what they pick - it looks good in reports.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office.

I use OO for everything because I think it is better than MS Office. Most importantly, it runs on several platforms - whether I'm on a Windows desktop, Linux desktop, or Sun UNIX station I can edit and print the same documents. Second (touching on the article's issue) I know that the data stored in OpenOffice's files will have superior longevity to any proprietary solution.

I don't worry too much about proprietary software and closed source, but where data longevity is concerned I do care. Have you ever taken a look at those SXW word processor files? They're just ZIP archives containing several XML files, one for style, one for content, etc. Extracting the data from OO's data files is easy to do.

Re:Why would this lure them away?

Why would it lure people from Microsoft? People don't just use Office because they are forced into it. They use it because the alternatives suck.

There are many different kinds of people. I'm sure there are a few MS Office users that, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have come to the conclusion that MS Office is the best office suite for them, but I suspect that group is pretty small. There is also a group of people who, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have concluded that MS Office sucks; when those people use MS Office, they do so because Microsoft controls the standard.

And then there is the last, and probably by far largest, group of users: people who use MS Office not because they prefer it but because it is the only office suite they know and because switching to something else would be a big hassle. Part of that hassle is having to learn a new UI, and another part of that hassle is to try to convert documents in Microsoft's proprietary format.

and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality.

The needs of most users are more than adequately covered by versions of Microsoft Office that are several years old, as well as by Open Office. Offering more features is not going to make an open source office suite win against Microsoft Office.

Quite to the contrary: an open source office suite probably can win away users by being more usable and offering fewer features than Microsoft Office.

Re:to really lure people away from Office

It is just that the Microsoft format ist not really a standard. Face it the MSO formats are all undocumented, the Star division did several manyears of reverse engineering of the formats to achieve the results which exist now. And there is no alternative office product currently in existence than the ones from Microsoft which are able to handle the undocumented Microsoft formats better. OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between, which are prone to crash if the document has an error or some weird ole stream within the document cannot be found. The whole file format situation of MSO is a huge mess which Microsoft tries to get away from as well. (hence the move to a documenten but with patents plastered xml baseds office format) Btw. yes I know there exists an official specification to the old office formats, but face it they are nothing more than a nice fairytale contentwise.

Re:to really lure people away from Office

OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between

This is a very important point which doesn't get stressed enough when people complain about MS office compatability.

Even different version of MS Office has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently... or a more appropriate comparison... even the same version of MS Office, for MacOS v.s. Windows has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently.

People also tend to rely heavily on the idiosyncracies of their local configuration (printer metrics, fonts, paper size) to align and layout their documents. An awful lot of people who write documents lack basic wordprocessing skills, yet they attempt complex desktop publishing tasks using a wordprocessor(!)

When these documents are converted into a different wordprocessor, it is no wonder that OOO can't match the nonsense arbitrary document layout ... it can't possibly know the idosyncracies of Bob's Win2k machine with a Lexmark printer, although it can attempt to match the idosyncracies of Bob's wordprocessor.

and that is what this is for

When the OpenOffice file format becomes an ISO standard, Microsoft may be forced to support it, since organizations will likely put "ISO office document standard compliance" into their requirements.

Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support.

The problem is: Microsoft Office formats are not a "standard"; they aren't even a "de-facto standard" or a "proprietary standard". They are simply whatever Microsoft's codebase happens to write into files this release. It's impossible to be fully compatible with that. Not even Microsoft manages to.

That's why an ISO standard office document format would be so important.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

Businesses don't care about interoperability.

Huh? I hear interoperability concerns cited as the number one reason that businesses still use Windows & MS Office. It has become standard practice in recent years for business documents (e.g. proposals, invoices, etc.) to be passed around as MS Word documents. People are nervous to move away from MS Word because they are concerned that they might not be able to open these documents in another system. They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.

Sure, your Fortune 50 companies may need some features that OO doesn't provide, but the number of office suite users in those companies is a small minority compared to those in SMEs.

An interesting point about OO's file format is that it is very conducive to being manipulated by external programs. And if it becomes ISO standardised, then that would provide some level of assurance that the format will be supported long term. This kind of thing can be important when it comes to building an information management system around the files.

Re:It won't lure anyone from Office

Your argument supports itself, but little else.

I will lure lots of people from Office, potentially. It's at least a step in the wrong direction toward bigger things.

Realistically, no big enterprise rollouts of Office are going to drop it in favor of OO.org just because of this, but those small mom'n'pop and small businesses out there that you conveniently ignore don't need Office. They mostly don't need even the bulk of OO.org's features really. They run Office because of lock-in and hopefully won't have to forever.

Those large businesses by the way probably love ISO standards. What if ISO standards dictate that any ISO 9001 certified company must maintain all its data in open formats - it's a stretch just now, but I see a lot of huge companies who love to put banners on their buildings bragging of being ISO 9001 certified.

This may have an influence enough that MS adds the ISO standard formats to Office, then OO.org really has no barriers to the majority of the Office market that doesn't need anything from Office but the file filters.
-N

Re:Cutting down on vendor lock-in

Well actually its as important what the dominant consumer does as the dominant vendor. If goverenments around the world want the standard, then they will use a standard compliant system. If that occurs, what MS does matters less. No leader can lead without followers.

Re:Standards and standards

I advocate OO.org every time I can, but it's harder when people are used to get MS's software for free from their friends. Anybody care to comment on what can be done to 'sell' OO.org to these people?

Call the BSA on their ass? Once they get a few million dollar fine for using "free" proprietary software, they'll probably not be such a fan of it anymore... (Only partly joking...)

Re:I wonder..

Kind of how like how Microsoft (please, don't ever use 'M$') obeys ANSI C standards in VC, like how they oben the W3C html standards in Internet Explorer.

How many microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just declare darkness to be the new standard.