Microsoft's Open XML is now a Standard

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445269723137820164.post-53551870024312205472008-04-01T16:07:00.000-07:002008-04-01T16:44:37.203-07:002008-04-01T16:44:37.203-07:00Microsoft's Open XML is now a Standard<div style="text-align: justify;">This just <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/01/business/msft.php">off the press</a>. And no April Fool's joke, it got <a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?id=601852&op=view">slashdotted</a> to me. The ISO approved Microsoft's Open XML as a standard putting it in the same league as PDF, HTML and ODF. For those who haven't been following the debate, Microsoft has been lobbying for this for more than a year now ("over 14 months of intense review", <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-01OpenXMLVotePR.mspx">according to MSFT</a>) and fighting opposition from IBM and Sun. The implications: <ul><li>This gives Office 2007 a big boost, marketing wise. With competition coming in from online office tools by the likes of Google and Zoho, having control over a standard is a big deal. (Zoho supports OOXML currently, btw.)</li><li>Apple, Novell, and even IBM now are writing apps that support OOXML.</li><li>It will setback the adoption of Open source Office tools in the mainstream; national bodies of countries vote for these ISO standards. </li></ul> Why should you care about this? If you have anything to do with writing applications for document management, content management, office business applications, interoperability, this is a format you need to understand. More work for us to do. Problem is, OOXML is <a href="http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/03/how-many-defects-remain-in-ooxml.html">still buggy</a>. From Rob's article <blockquote>Among the defects are some rather serious ones such as: <ul><li>storage of plain text passwords in database connection strings</li><li>Undefined mappings between CSS and DrawingML</li><li>Errors in XML Schema definitions</li><li>Dependencies of proprietary Microsoft Internet Explorer features</li><li>Spreadsheet functions that break with non-Latin characters</li><li>Dependencies on Microsoft OLE method calls</li><li>Numerous undefined terms and features</li></ul> </blockquote> The <a href="http://polishlinux.org/gnu/microsoft-admits-manipulation-abandons-ooxml/">April fool's joke on this</a> has to be from Linux fans. </div>Sowmya Karmalihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09200953962645166407noreply@blogger.com