On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Jürgen Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > The OpenDocument format (ODF) which has it's roots in OpenOffice is a > good thing and it helped a lot that office productivity becomes a little > bit more transparent and a step forward to become vendor independent. > Ideally one standard would have been used and would evolve over time to > address new requirements, features etc. > > We all know that the reality is different and we have today 2 open > standards for more or less the same thing, at least from my point of view. >
We always had to support at least two document formats: our native format for OpenOffice and the native format for Microsoft Office. This has been true from the start. Although many of us would have preferred to see a single widespread open standard in use, it is progress that we have detailed specifications for two formats now, along with patent assurances that came with the standardization process. This helps OpenOffice. As you know, when OpenOffice first started the Microsoft file format had to be reverse engineered. Now we have 7000+ pages of specification. > We have ODF which is an OASIS and ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006), see > [1] and [2]. And we have OOXML which is an Ecma and ISO standard > (ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008), see [3] and [4]. > > We can now argue why do we have 2 standards and can discuss the pros and > cons. But does it help? I don't think so and I believe we have to live > with the current situation. > As before, we always have had two formats to support. The main difference is now they are both standardized and have better documentation. > But this means that we have to take into account that OOXML is an > important file format that becomes more and more important over time. > And that we should think about a strategy to support this format better > in AOO. > > We see growing demand for better interoperability with OOXML and I > believe we can't ignore this anymore. We have OOXML import which have to > be improved and we don't have an export yet. I think it was a strategic > decision from Sun/Oracle to focus on an import only. I believe the goal > was to push ODF and an ODF eco system which was not a bad idea. But > again the reality seems to be different today and the demand for OOXML > is growing. > > That is the reason why we will start to investigate in a better OOXML > support for AOO and you will probably notice some more activity in the > future going in this direction. We have already started to analyze what > we have and how we can push things forward. One thing is of course the > missing export and the other thing an improved import. For the import we > are thinking about a bigger change to consolidate 3 different approaches > in 3 applications that we have today and we plan to start a new > framework. Something cleaner and better structured as what we have today > and that will give us further opportunities to use it for analyzing of > documents and used features, tracking of our coverage and in the end to > become more efficient. > This sounds like a good approach. > Of course this does not mean that we support ODF any less. We remain > strong supporters of ODF and aim to be the reference implementation for > the standard. AOO committers like Regina, Oliver and Rob work directly > on the ODF standard in OASIS. And if we have any OOXML questions, I have some friendly contacts at Microsoft that might be able to answer questions. > And it is not really about choosing one standard over another. The point > is to preserve the MS interop capabilities that OOo always had, and > update it to work with the latest formats used by MSO. > > Anyway this will be a major task but I believe a necessary and important > one for AOO to continue to be the best free open source office suite. > It is worth thinking as well as better support for non-WYSIWYG formats. For example, I get a lot of requests for a clean, structurally accurate unformatted (X)HTML output. So not trying to mimic the appearance of the document, but getting the structure right. If we can get good HTML output it is an attractive intermediate format for transforming to other similar XML-based formats like EPUB and DITA. Regards, -Rob > > Juergen > > > [1] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office > > [2] > http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43485 > > [3] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm > > [4] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=51463 > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
