Mittwoch März 16, 2005
Just switch! - Open Standards make the Difference
StarOffice 8 introduces a new key feature of which most people underestimate its importance. StarOffice 8 together with its sibling OpenOffice.org are the first office suites to support the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format as the default file format. The file format was developed based on the former OpenOffice.org/StarOffice file format by the OASIS technical committee.
A while ago the European Commission evaluated different document file formats and invited different vendors to reply to the EC's recommendation. Interestingly, Microsoft admits publicly and in written form that the Microsoft XML file formats had not been designed to be implementation and vendor independent, but that they were derived from the structure of the existing Microsoft Office applications. As a consequence, it seems logical that these file formats cannot represent an open standard. Here is a quote from Microsoft's letter to the European Commission:
"The Office XML reference schemas describe in XML the basic data structures that have been in use in Microsoft products for over a decade. A significant part of the usefulness of the schemas comes from the fact that they enable backward compatibility with documents using older Microsoft Office formats and thereby enable customers to transform their existing documents to XML. In other words, we did not start creating the Office XML schemas from a blank state."
http://europa.eu.int/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=18036
This (creating a file format from a blank state) is more or less what OpenOffice.org did. The OpenOffice.org XML file format, used and deployed since version 1.0 of OpenOffice.org and version 6 of the StarOffice software, was designed from scratch with the goal to create a format that can be adopted by multiple vendors. In addition, the format leveraged existing open standards wherever it made sense. There is a StarOffice white paper that explains the advantes of the file format. Additional information can be found on the OpenOffice.org XML project website.
That the Sun supported OpenOffice.org project apparently did a good job in creating an open and implementation independent file format becomes obvious in the fact that the OASIS technical committee members chose the file format as the basis for their file format. Now a number of office suites have started to support the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format. Just read the following quotes:
KOffice
"Up to KOffice 1.3, the XML tags used by KOffice's applications are private to KOffice. From KOffice 1.4 on, we plan to switch to OpenOffice.org compatible file formats."
http://www.koffice.org/faq/
TextMaker
"Now they tell us, when our OpenOffice/OASIS/OpenDocument filters for our TextMaker word processor [softmaker.de] are pretty much completed... ;-)
In earnest, is anyone using Microsoft Office XML for anything?
Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/15/1420205
AbiWord
"We have import and export filters for the OpenOffice document format
which is the same."
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-user/2005/Jan/0082.html
IBM
"Indeed, we already offer products (IBM Workplace Client Technology) which conform with the current draft specifications developed within the OASIS TC."
http://europa.eu.int/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=18035
I'm looking forward to the day when Microsoft and Corel will announce their support for the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format. The more people ask for it (the OpenDocument support), the sooner this day will be.
( Mrz 16 2005, 02:23:03 PM CET )
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