I think you may be over-estimating the similarities. There are strong differences in the models and architectures of the two formats. And their goals were different. That they both use Zip and XML is a bit like saying my house and the railroad station both have copper plumbing.
While it is the case that there are many common features that users see and use, how they are reflected in the format is quite different and, in some cases, lossy under portability, even sometimes incommensurable. Despite that, there is high portability for a class of documents. - Dennis Anecdote #1: Regina and I just ran into an interesting one. Passwords use to protect fields and sheets and text documents don't convert between the OOXML and ODF formats. One reason is that the code in which the password is stored before it is converted to a digital hash is different. So even if the hash is moved, it can't be unlocked using the other format because the internal form of the password is different, and there's no way to adjust the hash for that. (In the case of encrypted documents, as opposed to protected documents, that doesn't work either, not the least being that there is no encryption as part of OOXML.) Ignoring the encrypted document case, there are ways that the products could come closer with regard to protection passwords. Anecdote #2: Microsoft Word protects word documents by setting protection for the entire document and the user then selecting those parts of the document that are to have relaxed protection. Then a single password is used to lock in the arrangement. In ODF and OpenOffice, the selections to be protected are identified and they can be locked individually by passwords, with the rest of the document treated differently (or with yet another password). It is very had to take a protected document that was created in one model and convert it to a *protected* document in the other model. What is usually done is that each product ignores the protection settings from the other. This is a model incompatibility. That's a bigger deal, especially if it confounds something that is important to a very large number of users. -----Original Message----- From: VA [mailto:cuyfa...@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 13:13 To: dennis.hamil...@acm.org; users@global.libreoffice.org Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice What I find maddening is that two document formats can be so similar, and yet remain so different. As Maxwell Smart would say, "missed by THAT much." Virgil -----Original Message----- From: Dennis E. Hamilton Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 1:27 PM To: 'VA' ; 'Pedro' ; users@global.libreoffice.org Subject: RE: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice I don't understand the maddening aspect of this reaction. I suppose I don't have to. When ODF was developed at OASIS, one of the design points was to be based on the functionality of OpenOffice 1.x as it was at the time, starting from an XML format that was developed for that product. It was explicitly ruled out of scope for the format to have counterparts of Microsoft Office document features. When OOXML was developed, using the Open Packaging Conventions that were already used by Microsoft for a different project, a critical goal was to have fidelity-preserving, convertible features of legacy Microsoft Office documents. There is also a strict version that doesn't include so much of the legacy accommodation and has some better feature provisions going forward. There you have it. ODF 1.0 then ODF 1.1 and now ODF 1.2. Also, OOXML versions 1 through 3 (so far), although ODF changed more from ODF 1.1 to ODF 1.2 (because of the addition of OpenFormula) than anything that happened to OOXML since the ISO OOXML version. Neither of these are DocBook (an XML document format) or DITA or any other XML-carried document format. None of that is surprising in any technical way: XML is not a document format, it is a markup format for extending and customizing into any number of document models and schemas. XML by itself (unlike HTML, yet-another document format) doesn't establish any kind of document format whatsoever. There was an ISO working group looking into the harmonization of document formats, especially with what could make better portability among OOXML-based and ODF-based software. A recent report on the subject is rather interesting. Look at <http://www.interoperability-center.com/en/dokumenten-iop-lab>. The final report on Document Profiling and a White Paper on Document Interoperability are listed in the "Publications" sidebar. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: VA [mailto:cuyfa...@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 06:56 To: Pedro; users@global.libreoffice.org Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice This is utterly maddening. Based on Pedro's post, I ran a simple test. I created a document in Word (.docx) and an identical document in LibO (.odt). I saved them both and then extracted their contents using 7-zip Manager. I was amazed at how similar the two document contents were, and yet how different. Neither document had any of the binary smilie faces I've come to expect by opening a .doc document in a text editor. All of the individual files contained formatting codes in simple text. And, yet... The maddening part is how two programs can create the same type of documents (xml files saved in a zipped format) and yet remain so completely different. [ ... ] -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
