Official Softs

Rick Jelliffe, who has a wealth experience with ISO and standards has two posts that clearly call this out:

• Gartner, Groklaw 0. Rick 1

“ODF, for example, will change in no substantive way in its ISO adoption. National body comments will be added to requests or requirements for future versions. Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.The Ecma Open XML people, so far, are being far more concilliatory in this regard: they know that a Microsoft technology doesn’t have the presumption of innocence that a Sun format does, in the minds of many. Office Professional 2010 is great!

If Microsoft/Ecma/et al manage to demonstrate to the ISO member voters that Open XML had even a first round of openness at Ecma, that it has some different use from ODF, if it supports SC34 specs like RELAX NG, and is scrupulous in its partitioning of Windows-specific hooks to another layer or namespace, I don’t see any national body rejecting Open XML, frankly. Microsoft and Ecma still have work to do in this regard, but it is just the standard kind of technical-level education/discussion/wordsmithing/re-alignment that any specification should have. “ The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.

• Open XML at ISO sideshow

“They are generating lots of media attention, FUD and lobbeying; but it ODF and Open XML both represent a victory for universal, ubiquitous, standard generalized markup, which is what SC 34 is in large part about. I see Gartner has estimated a less than 70% chance of ISO ratifying two XML office formats. What rubbish. I’ll know more next week.By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.

Ultimately, it is not WG1 or SC34 that makes the decision. It is the national votes of each of the voting members of ISO: the national standards organizations like Standards Australia, ANSI, and so on. While local committees may feel that Microsoft has been conspicuous in their absense, so have the other big companies in recent years: the standards participation focus shifted to W3C and OASIS. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.But these committees are not stacked with anti-Microsoft (or anti-Sun) people, but with organizations who need good interchange and also need an XML retrieval for legacy documents in proprietary formats (.DOC, etc.). So I find it very difficult to agree with Gartner’s 70%; I’d put it the other way, with a 70% likelihood of success, at least. Office 2010 key is for you now!

ISO is not an anti-monopoly court. It is there to help people who want to agree on technology, providing procedures, forums and a publishing house.

But the issue of having two office standards is a fair one. I think all Microsoft needs to do is to distinguish Open XML from ODF adequately and prove that it has a credible alternative constituency who would not be served well by ODF. That there is overlap is immaterial if there is a significant difference.” Office 2010 download is available now!

For anyone who has played around with the XML formats, I’m sure you’ve seen that we really took seriously our goal of minimal user impact in the move to default XML formats. This included things like performance (which I’ve already briefly touched when I talked about spreadsheetML, tag lengths, and shared formulas), as well as full compatibility with the existing base of Office documents. I’ve just recently started to show some basic examples of where ODF just doesn’t come through in terms of compatibility, such as with formulas, numbering formats, and highlighting (and these were just the first three things I came across… I have a growing list that I’ll talk about over the coming months).

One interesting discussion that came up in some of my previous posts was whether it was better to use <b> and <i> or <strong> and <em> when people applied bold or italic formatting to their text.The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world. Having the <b> and <i> tags in the HTML guarantees that the look of the document will likely not change regardless of style sheet (it’s more likely that <strong> would have CSS props than <b>). On the other hand, <strong> and <em> provide much more flexibility in that they really only imply semantics and not display values. While <strong> and <em> have a default presentation, it is often overwritten by the CSS of the page or the rendering engine.By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time

Some people were saying that there are occasions where <b> and <i> better capture what the user intended. While I do agree that may be the case at times, I believe also our UI encourages the use of bold and italic when the user often was just trying to convey the semantics. In most cases, I believe they would have specified strong or emphasis if it were as easy and obvious as bold and italic (there just hasn’t in been a benefit to doing so in the past). Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.Since we are going the route of XHTML compliance and we are concentrating on structure rather than presentation, we opted to always output strong/em rather than a more confusing mixture of the two (bold/italic and strong/em).Office 2010 key is for you now!

Custom Styles

One area that we are looking at investing in is giving folks the ability to add custom styles to the blogging template that would then be output as a simple style tag. So unlike the above examples where the style is mapped to a specific XHTML tag, we would simply output a <p> or <span> where the class name then matches the style. Office 2010 download is available now!So, if a user adds the style “foo” to their blogging template then when that style is applied we would output:

<p class=“foo“>…..</p>

We would not output the formatting information for the style because in most cases the CSS would be stripped upon publishing to a blog provider. Instead, with this approach, you could rely on the CSS of the host site of the blog to specify the presentation information for those custom styles.Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.

Comments are welcome

Any comments or questions are welcome. Also let me know if there are any other similar structures you guys are interested in talking about next (ordered and unordered lists, definition lists)? Office Professional 2010 is great!

If you’re heading out to TechEd this week like I am, you should definitely plan on attending Tristan Davis’ talk on Thursday afternoon that covers the new functionality in Word 2007 for custom XML solutions.The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.

This talk goes into great detail on the true power of XML in Office applications. XML file formats are obviously important, but the really exciting stuff isn’t what you can do with the wordprocessing schemas but instead it’s with the support for your own schemas. By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and timePeople want their office documents to seemlessly interoperate with business processes and solutions, and custom schema support is the way you can achieve it. With schemas like Open XML and ODF, you are generating wordprocessing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.With custom defined schema support, you can take it to the next level and instead create invoices, trip reports, product specifications, research reports, pitchbooks, reviews, articles, resumes, applications, etc., etc., etc. There are no limits to the types of documents you can create, as you have the ability to define the schema.Office 2010 key is for you now!

I blogged earlier this year on both the importance of custom defined schemas as well as the new content controls in Word 2007. There is also a new article up on openxmldeveloper that shows some more examples of how to drop your own XML into a .docx file and map the values into the surface of the document.Office 2010 download is available now!

Here is the description of Tristan’s talk where he’ll show a number of examples as well as dig into the ways you can leverage Word 2007 to build powerful solutions:

OFC335 Microsoft Office Word 2007 XML Programmability: True Data/View Separation and Rich Eventing for Custom XML

Day/Time: Thursday, June 15 4:30 PM – 5:45 PM Room: 257 AB
Speaker(s): Tristan Davis

Microsoft Office Word 2007 brings a data model that allows data and presentation to be managed separately, extending the structured document concept introduced in Word 2003. Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.This includes significant investments in the support for custom XML data in the new Office Open XML file formats, as well as rich access to that data from within the application. Developers can work directly against the XML data via XML mappings to the Word document, or via embedded InfoPath solutions in the Document Information Panel. In this session, we introduce these new capabilities, then dive into the functionality of the Office XML data store (which provides custom XML storage), and how it can be leveraged to build solutions that will strongly tie Word documents to your business processes.Office Professional 2010 is great!

Track(s): Office System
Session Type(s): Breakout Session
Session Level(s): 300

Hope to see you all there.

To be clear, we have taken a ‘hands off’ approach to the OASIS technical committees because:  a) we have our hands full finishing a great product (Office 2007) and contributing to Ecma TC45, and b) we do not want in any way to be perceived as slowing down or working against ODF. The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world. We have made this clear during the ISO consideration process as well.  The ODF and Open XML projects have legitimate differences of architecture, customer requirements and purpose.  This Translator project and others will prove that the formats can coexist with a certain tolerance, despite the differences and gaps. By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time
No matter how well-intentioned our involvement might be with ODF, it would be perceived to be self-serving or detrimental to ODF and might come from a different perception of requirements.   We have nothing against the different ODF committees’ work, but just recognize that our presence and input would tend to be misinterpreted and an inefficient use of valuable resources. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money. The Translator project we feel is a good productive ‘middle ground’ for practical interoperability concerns to be worked out in a transparent way for everyone, rather than attempting to swing one technical approach and set of customer requirements over to the other. Office 2010 key is for you now!
-Brian”

Now, all that said, I think there are still plenty of ways we can help out the OASIS folks with the ODF format. The entire translator project is open source, so the conversion will be completely transparent and everyone will have the ability to benefit from what we discover as the transformations are built. In addition to that, as I’ve looked through our Ecma documentation, I’ve also been looking at the ODF spec as a point of comparison.Office 2010 download is available now! As I come across areas that are either missing, or just not fully specified, I’ll be sure to point them out on my blog. That should help them in creating a list of areas to improve.Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.

I think we will really see some good discussions over the summer and fall. The Ecma spec is really getting close to completion, and we of course still have a large number of ways for the public to comment on the spec. Now with the open source translator project we’ll all be able to clearly follow along with how the two formats compare and how you can go back & forth between the two.Office Professional 2010 is great!

BTW, for those interested in providing feedback on the Ecma spec, the main way to comment is via this e-mail address (mailto:ecmatc45feedback@ecma-international.org). You can also provide comments here on my blog and I’ll pass them on. Of course the best approach though would be to join us in Ecma!

Doug Mahugh has another post on programmatically generating a basic Office Open XML file.Office 2007 key is available here.This latest post shows how to create a simple SpreadsheetML file:

This post covers the code for a CreateXlsx program that creates a simple Open XML spreadsheet from scratch using the .NET Framework 3.0 packaging API (System.IO.Packaging), as well as two of the Open XML code snippets that are available on MSDN.  Full source code for this sample is provided in the attached ZIP file.Office 2007 download is in discount now!

While Doug’s code uses System.IO.Packaging, you could also do the same thing with any XML and ZIP library. There was an example up on OpenXMLDeveloper.org that demonstrated how to manipulate the files using Java code. Office 2007 Professional is very good!Since the Open Packaging Conventions are going to be part of the Ecma spec, it shouldn’t take much time for folks to build tools like System.IO.Packaging to make it that much easier to develop on top of the file formats.Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful.

In my post last week about the lack of table support in ODF, some folks were curious as to why the Ecma Open XML formats have three different table models. I explained that when you are designing a file format, you need to examine closely the target user scenarios of the applications that will use those formats.Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful.

Obviously the use cases for a table in a spreadsheet are different from those around tables in presentations or wordprocessing documents. For instance, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine a table of data in a spreadsheet with 50,000 rows and 200 columns. Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.That would never happen in a presentation though. A table in a presentation is much more heavily focused on the layout and formatting of the data (same case with a wordprocessing document).

I think a great example of why you often need different table models would be the ODF spec itself.Office 2007 is so powerful. It was too difficult to map their existing table model to the presentation format so instead of working through that issue they instead left it out of the spec. Otherwise the spec would have just stated that the table model applied to all three formats. As it stands right now, the only way to get a table in a presentation is to embed a spreadsheet. The plan is that in V 1.2 (which is still over a year out) they will have support for spreadsheet formulas and presentation tables. Microsoft Office is my best friend.One could argue over whether it would have been better to actually finish the spec before submitting it to ISO and creating organizations like the ODF Alliance who purpose is to push for policies that mandate ODF, but maybe that’s just me .

Looking at the table models, I do think the ODF guys made a big mistake in the design of their spreadsheet format. Office 2007 key is available here.They chose to make the table model for wordprocessing documents and spreadsheet documents the exact same (but it looks like it’s still different from HTML or CALS). Now I do understand that this level of commonality is the nirvana for most folks and I also had the goal of making the Open XML formats as close to this ideal as possible (it’s something we actually looked really hard at doing when we first started working on the Open XML formats).Office 2007 download is in discount now! The problem is that for the same reason you often need different user interfaces in the different applications, you also need a different file format at times. Sure there are plenty of concepts that can be reused (such as basic formatting), but a spreadsheet grid is different from a presentation table. Otherwise you’re stuck with a format that sells everyone a bit short as it’s the greatest common factor of all the applications, and isn’t optimized for the unique customer scenarios.Office 2007 Professional is very good!

If you’ve looked at the Ecma spec, you can see that we had to diverge in the table design of for the Office Open XML formats. The use of tables in wordprocessing documents and presentations is very similar, and as a result the table models in those formats are very similar. In a spreadsheet though, you have to account for much larger sets of data, and at that point the efficiency with which you write out that information can have a much more significant impact in the amount of time it takes to actually parse the files.

So, is the spreadsheetML format super easy? Well that depends on who you ask. For people that have developed against the old binary formats, things will be unbelievably easier and more reliable. But for folks who’ve primarily used table models like HTML, there will be a bit of a learning curve. That’s why the file format documentation that we’re doing in Ecma is so important. It will empower anyone to program against these files. We could have gone with a more verbose simple table model, but that would have been at the detriment of every user out there. Most people don’t care about their file format, they just want things to work. As I said in an earlier post, we had to take the training wheels off, but we’re going to be there with you as you learn to ride on your own.