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I asked Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003, why it has taken Microsoft so long to address these deficiencies. "It comes down to what we were doing with our time," he said. "Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight."

These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages, but XAML, Microsoft's proprietary code for creating rich visual content.

3.2.2.2. A pox on both your houses!

Hi Robert,

What you've posted are examples of MSOffice ”compatibility settings” used to establish backwards compatibility with older documents, and, for the conversion of alien file formats (such as various versions of WordPerfect .wpd). These compatibility settings are unspecified in that we know the syntax but have no idea of the semantics. And without the semantic description there is no way other developers can understand implementation. This of course guarantees an unacceptable breakdown of interoperability.

But i would be hesitant to make my stand of rejecting OOXML based on this issue. It turns out that there are upwards of 150 unspecified compatibility settings used by OpenOffice/StarOffice. These settings are not specified in ODF, but will nevertheless show up in OpenOffice ODF documents – similarly defying interoperability efforts!

Since the compatibility settings are not specified or even mentioned in the ODF 1.0 – ISO 26300 specification, we have to go to the OOo source code to discover where this stuff comes from. Check out lines 169-211. Here you will find interesting settings such as, “UseFormerLineSpacing, UseFormerObjectPositioning, and UseFormerTextWrapping”.

So what's going on here?

To find out the facts, I interviewed Chris Lilley, the W3C lead for the CDF
project, and his answer couldn't have been more clear: "The one thing I'd
really want your readers to know is that CDF was not created to be, and
isn't suitable for use as, an office format." In fact, it isn't even an
format at all - although it has been matched for export purposes with
another W3C specification, called WICD - but WICD is a non-editable format
intended for viewing only. Moreover, no one from the Foundation has joined
W3C, nor explained to W3C what the Foundation's founders have in mind.

It is highly unfortunate that the founders of a tax exempt organization
that solicited donations, "To support the community of volunteers in
promoting, improving and providing user assistance for ODF and software
designed to operate on data in this format," should publicly announce that
it believes that ODF will fail. By endorsing a standard that has no
rational relationship to office formats at all, they can only serve to
confuse the marketplace and undermine the efforts of the global community
they claimed to serve.

So, there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. CDF can't replace ODF, according to Lilley. It wasn't designed to be used as an office format. It's good for other things.

So, was all this media push really about ODF? Or about damaging it with FUD and giving support to Microsoft's assertion that the world craves more than one office format standard so we can all struggle with interoperability complexity for the rest of our born days? And is it a coincidence it all happened on the eve of the next vote in February on Microsoft's competing MSOOXML? Was Microsoft behind this? Or did they just get lucky? Microsoft representatives, like Jason Matusow, certainly gave support to what the 3-man crew was saying, so much so that ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley wrote that, "the ODF camp might unravel before Microsoft’s rival Office Open XML (OOXML) comes up for final international standardization vote early next year." Dream on. ODF is doing fine. It's the OpenDocument Foundation that is shutting down.

But here's my question: did the Microsoft reps not understand the tech, that CDF can't replace ODF? How trust-inspiring do you find that? Or did they think that *we'd* never figure it out? Whatever the story might be, unfortunately for Microsoft, people aren't as dumb as Microsoft needs them to be. FUD has a very limited shelf life in the Internet age. There is always somebody who knows better. And they'll tell the world.

Just because we are garage challenged doesn't mean we can't find the back door to the big house :)

The larger issue at stake here is not whether or not we have a garage, or what our contribution to ODF has been over the course of five years as active members of OASIS ODF. What it really comes down to is the implementation of ODF in the real world.

Microsoft recently released the specification for XAML, an XML-to-object mapping technology that is most closely identified with WPF. They also released a specification for a XAML vocabularly as applied to WPF, Microsoft’s .NET-based user interface technology introduced with .NET 3.0 which serves as the baseline for Silverlight (Silverlight is a subset of WPF).

Some claim that this is Microsoft’s attempt to displace HTML as a standard for the Internet, even going so far as make complaints to the EC about it. For a company aiming to displace HTML, Microsoft certainly provides a lot of support for the technology (ASP.NET, an AJAX library in the form of ATLAS, lots of HTML authoring tools, etc.). WPF, however, was clearly designed to make desktop development more attractive by applying the lessons of web site creation to desktop development (markup languages are great for UI layout). Further, they wanted to make desktop applications more network-aware, a detail that makes possible things like Silverlight, to be sure, but also enables users to run full WPF applications in a web browser (think: applications you can access over the web, but then drop onto your desktop for use while offline).

Does that make desktop application development more competitive with web development (and, hopefully, boost the success of the pure-browser variant of that technology, Silverlight)? Clearly, Microsoft hopes it does. That, however, isn’t such a bad thing.

'A diversion from the real end game – the taking of the internet'

IMHO, the key to Microsoft's OOXML strategy can be seen in the recently released MSOffice SDK. The SDK provides a component for the fluid conversion of OOXML to something called fixed/flow. The fixed part of this interesting conjunction is also known as XPS, which is designed as a proprietary alternative to PDF. The flow part is a fascinating and highly proprietary replacement for (X)HTML - CSS.

Reading further through the MSOffice SDK, one can't help but be amazed at the lack of W3C technologies; especially (X)HTML, CSS, XForms and SVG. What we have instead is an entangling cascade of stuff like OOXML, fixed/flow, silverlight, XAML, and WPF. And then there is that recent promise of other high volume API's probably delivered through future Exchange, SharePoint, and MS SQL Server SDK's.

So, at the end of the day, what are we looking at here? IMHO, Microsoft has figured out that the smart thing to do is leverage and extend their existing desktop monopoly into the next generation of cloud computing where the Internet platform rules.

To pull this off, they have a number of problems to overcome; not the least of which is that they need to catch a break on anti trust, and, get OOXML through ISO. And oh yeah, there's that little problem that Windows can't do cloud computing.

Standards often are made by insiders, established players, vendors with something to sell and so something to lose. Web standards bodies organized as pay-to-play consortia thus leave out developers and users, although vendors of course claim to represent everyone fully and fairly.

I've worked within such bodies and continue to try to make progress in them, but I've come to the conclusion that open standards need radically open standardization processes. They don't need too many cooks, of course; they need some great chefs who work well together as a small group. Beyond this, open standards need transparency. Transparency helps developers and other categories of "users" see what is going on, give corrective feedback early and often, and if necessary try errant vendors in the court of public opinion.