* how does it affect you specifically (being an advanced user / someone in the know / a professional in a related field).
Mainly, additional administrative headache. We're right in the middle of migrating most of the company's desktops to Linux w/ OpenOffice as the office suite. OOo 2.4 supports MS Office 97 and 2000 formats, especially Excel and Word, enough that I don't need to worry much about compatibility. OOXML would just add to the confusion on what format to use. I don't see any much different between MS' OOXML and the native MS Office formats. If Microsoft was really serious in document interoperability, they would have as easily "open"ed the specs for .xls and .doc. Instead, they chose to muddle the field and in the process, destroy the credibility of ISO and, locally, BPS. And OOXML is a standard being proposed to propagate the existence of the native MS Office format. From the Letter from UP Diliman (posted at http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/04/the-philippine.html): "autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Emulate Word95 Full Width Character Spacing) footnoteLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement) lineWrapLikeWord6 (Emulate 6.0 Line Wrapping for East Asian Text) mwSmallCaps (Emulate Word 5.x for Macintosh Small Caps Formatting) shapeLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 97 Tet Wrapping Around Floating Objects) suppressTopSpacingTP (Emaulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing) truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6 (Emulate WordPerfect 6.x Font Height Calculation) useWord2002TableStyleRules (Emulate Word 2002 Table Style Rules) useWord97LineBreakRules (Emulate Word 97 East Asian Line Breaking) wpJustification (Emulate WordPerfect 6.x Paragraph Justification)" Open standards should "set" the standards, not set "proprietary standards" to follow. * how does OOXML affect the typical computer user (your average Jose and Maria). I don't even think OOXML will be adopted by the large MS Office installations. And how can we expect Microsoft to follow this "standard" when they can't even interoperate between MS Office versions properly. * what is its relevance to your industry, if any As much as a lot of organizations out there have migrated to linux, the big majority is still MS-based. To these people, they won't be largely affected by OOXML. Even if I have migrated my company's PCs to Linux and OpenOffice, we still have to communicate with a lot of vendors and customers that use MS Office and its native format. A lot of installations out there still use old versions of MS Office. Will MS release "patches" to enables these versions to support OOXML? And what would be the value? They would just say, we are doing fine exchanging documents using the old formats, why bother? * what would've been the proper procedure in choosing an open standard There is one in place. MS, as usual, chooses to do things their way. * how important is an open standard In the non-MS environment, quite important. But even here, there are a lot of competing standards. In a largely MS setup, not really, as you have no choice but what MS offers you. * add anything else you feel will help our cause Who here thinks they (the 5 who voter FOR) supported OOXML because they believed in it? For those who raised heir hands: SUCKERS! --- mike t. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
