On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 12:41 -0500, John Mort wrote: > Anyone have any pointers for things to mention/discuss to make for > more intelligent comment submissions than, "ODF Rawks!"
One of the motivating factors for a state document formats is archiving - long term document format accessibility. Think "can I read this document 100 years from now?" There are a number of documents out there that have critical evaluations of the OOXML standard - give them a read over and find issues that are important to you. Here are a couple to get you started: http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOXML#Criticism Some of my high points: Lack of reference to other standards: Uses it's own internal standards or conflicts with existing standards for equations, colors, dates, embedded graphics, and other items Can't be implemented independently: There are some segments in that specify "behaves like Office 97 layout" and similar statements that are not actually specified in the standard. There are also sections of the standard that have implementation dependent binary blobs. Both of these would be difficult to resolve in the future without access to a functioning copy of MS Office. Patent/Licensing issues: The ability to implement the standard without infringing on Microsoft IP is unclear. There are some covenants not to sue that appear to not actually grant rights. Complexity / Legacy Compatibility / Replication of legacy bugs: The OOXML standard is 6000 pages, much longer than the ODF standard. Some of that is due to the lack of reference to other standards. It also has a lot of baggage to maintain legacy compatibility, including reproducing bugs present in older versions of MS Office products. --- Patrick Ladd IT Manager - Bottini Fuel (845)297-5580 / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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