[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: NY Times reference to 'secret coding'
Ken North writes: > which parts of the OOXML spec rely on 'secret coding' ? I have not read the OOXML specification, and so can't give a straight or well informed answer. That said, I can guess where some of the issues might be, and I'd be grateful if someone better informed than I can confirm or deny my hunch. There are often at least two levels of concern when considering compatibility of an office-style file format: 1) given the published specifications and an arbitray document instnace, can you extract the general semantics -- for example, can you tell that a given page is in two column format with a footnote at the bottom vs. 2) can you tell to the exact pixel how that document is to be printed on some particular printer, and can you predict for that printer exactly how long the footnote can be before it wraps to a second page? While I can't speak authoritatively regarding Microsoft Office or OOXML in particular, it wouldn't be surprising to find that a fair amount of the information needed for (1), quite possibly all of it, is in the OOXML specification. It is also quite possible that the information needed for compatibility at the level of (2) is not provided in the specification. If that's true, then to get that level of compatibility or "openness" you would need additional information, and presumably the "secret code" for the Microsoft Office products embodies at least one set of answers to the questions asked in (2). Note that, as a practical matter, (1) is sometimes sufficient for particular purposes but (2) is very often what you need. Certainly, over the years, this is where a lot of the concern has been with "lockin" to the widely deployed office applications. If I send you a file for a newsletter, for example, and your software correctly determines the number of paragraphs, headers, etc., but rearranges them on the page, then quite likely you won't consider the file format to be sufficiently interoperable for your purposes. So, seeing that the OOXML specification is asserted to "rely on 'secret coding'", I'm curious as to whether I am correctly guessing what the real issue is? Does the OOXML specifiction provide for compatible rendering in the sense of (2)? While I think that's what users typically need for interoperability, I'd be somewhat surprised if the OOXML specification provided it. BTW: I assume that because OpenOffice is Open Source, the answers to the equivalent questions for ODF can be determined from that source code. Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
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