2009/5/8 M. Fioretti <[email protected]>: > On Fri, May 08, 2009 19:24:25 PM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote: > > Dotan, > > I'm a bit confused. Isn't what you say here: > >> 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. > > just what you label as unwise a few lines below: > >> So you leave it up to MS to code the interoperability? That does not >> sound wise. > > Arguing that OOo should take example from MSO is **exactly** saying > that Microsoft decides what is acceptable and what is not. As you > yourself confirm explicitly: >
Exactly. I do not expect MS to code the ambiguous parts of ODF to be compatible with OOo. I expect them to make it different. >> Yes, the market leader gets to decide the format for everyone. That >> is, the market leader gets to decide the parts of the format not >> explicitly stated in the standards, for their market share of users. > > Now, I don't say this to mean that ODF is perfect, complete, etc... As > a matter of fact, I was the first to point out, almost 3 years ago, > that there would be hidden traps in underspecified parts, see > > http://robertogaloppini.net/2007/04/01/file-format-hidden-traps-in-opendocument-or-any-other-open-standard-and-how-to-avoid-them/ > > But accepting that "the market leader gets to decide for everyone", > even in the underspecified parts" is just the same as saying that ODF > as a whole is completely useless. If this were the case, we should > have never started using ODF, it would have been just the same to keep > using the OOO filters for .doc, .xls and .ppt. > The difference is that DOC and such are binary formats, reverse engineered. ODF documents can be opened and one can say "here, MS did or did not follow spec". For the places where MS does follow spec, but differently than OOo, OOo should consider adopting MS's example. For places where MS did not follow spec, screw them. > If the market leader gets to decide for everyone, or more exactly if > this principle remains acceptable in the specific field of file > formats, the market leader will continue to change its decisions every > year JUST TO REMAIN THE MARKET LEADER. > With the reasonable assumption that decisions won't be made to make ODF-spec parts non-spec, this is a non-issue as OOo would be ignoring those parts. > Whereas the whole, main, real point of ODF (and of the solutions I > proposed in the piece above), without denying its current limits, is > exactly to put an end to this idea that something like an alphabet can > be allowed to stay under control or lead of one single for profit > company. > Then it should have been better defined. Did not we learn anything from HTML? > The whole point of ODF and open file formats and all the movement > behind is exactly to never allow anymore that market leadership > happens or is artificially maintained by tricks at the file format level. > But the format was ambiguous. Hopefully 1.2 will address those issues. -- Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
