Dotan Cohen wrote:
Having ODF render differently in MSO and OOo will certainly help to
destroy ODF. That is why I argue that OOo should render as MSO does.
You are talking about empty concepts here. Too much philosophy about
market leaders and no real example. Too much talking about rendering, no
explanation of what rendering is. Let's analyze a real problem.
The biggest problem right now is that Excel will not load OOo
spreadsheets formulas because it expects that the file is using their
own namespace to represent formulas.
Example:
OpenOffice: oooc:=SUM([.A1];[.A2])
MsOffice: msoxl:=SUM(A1,A2)
Both can claim ODF 1.1 conformance, but the expected syntax in ODF 1.2
is the openoffice one. The ODF standard needs custom namespaces, it's a
great idea. If some spreadsheet develops a new feature not defined in
the standard, it should be able to save it right now. But using them
like MS did, to redefine common known formulas, is just plain wrong,
specially when we know that the next version of the standard will
mandate (or recommend) a OpenOffice-like version.
This is the main compatibility problem right now, making OOo save like
excel means that we are not following the ODF (1.2) standard. We lose
compatibility with all the other programs out there that follow the
standard (Gnumeric, Google Docs). Whenever MS changes their namespace we
must reverse engineer it again, each time, again and again. We cannot
implement any feature that needs saving before Excel implements it.
What's the point of ODF then?. We can just be using xlsx as our default
format. It will be the same.
I agree that we can and we should change OOo so that it can read files
that use the MSOffice private namespace. But saving in it?. No. We have
a standard, we should use it.
If we found a place where the actual standard or the proposed one is
lacking, and MS has implemented it in some different way than OO, then
yes, as long as the standard (or a draft) is not defined, copying MS
will be the wiser thing to do. But when MS and the standard (even
standard recommendations) conflict, we should follow the standard.
Wow, that was quite long text in English for me. I hope that you can
understand it.
Javier.
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