File format wars: Is there more to ODF vs. OOXML than vendor politics?

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Microsoft, the lords of time

Oh that wonderful 'open' standard. 6000 pages in which we learn tat any implementation of MS XML must be backward compatible wit software bugs in proprietary applications, applications who's specs remain unpublished. The year 1900 wasn't a leap year, but, because of a Microsoft coding error, Microsoft's proprietary XML relies on all implementations pretending that it is, which would result in time gaps being wrongly calculated and in some cases days of the week in spreadsheets would be incorrect. That's open - force the world to accept Microsoft coding errors.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/01/a_most_ingenious_paradox_make.html

"To help Office to become a standard, one adaptation governments could make would be to retroactively declare 1900 a leap year. This would require updates to history books and other documents (for instance, V-E day would change to May 7, and the World Trade Center attacks would have taken place on September 10"

Witness the power of Microsoft! Adoption of their bastardised, proprietary XML is so crucial to themthat they demand the world rewrites its history books so that their "standard" can become the norm. Ridiculous!

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070206212917261
A record 19 countries have logged "contradiction" reports with the Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC), the ISO/IEC body that is managing the Fast Track process under which OOXML (now Ecma 476) has been submitted. UK's British STandards Institute is among these dissenting bodies.

Meanwhile ...

http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200702/msg00000.html
Subject: Approval of OpenDocument v1.1 as OASIS Standard

* From: "Mary McRae"
* To: ,
* Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 09:28:53 -0500

OASIS members:

We are pleased to announce that the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Specification v1.1 has
been approved as an OASIS Standard. The submission of the approved standard can be found at [1].

Congratulations to the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC, and the community of
implementers, developers and users who have brought the work successfully to culmination.

Mary

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200701/msg00001.html


---------------------------------------------------
Mary P McRae
Manager of TC Administration, OASIS
email: mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org
web: www.oasis-open.org

Posted by: whisperycat   Posted on: 02/07/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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