Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

[BoyOfDestiny]

What should happen is .doc should be opened. It's a very fine format, if only other programs could easily work with it (no 100KB+ OpenOffice .doc files). What people don't understand is that XML is by its very nature a very slow format. Applications that work with mostly XML are very slow when dealing with data, especially web apps. The slowest is usually a web app that runs on Java and stores data with XML.

For small, simple tasks (XHTML, etc.) XML is a great descriptive format. But for large files, I think it's the wrong direction.

Which version of .doc? Each iteration of Office made changes to .doc, so it's a little different, thus the need to upgrade or procure an MS document viewer. Is .doc a fine format? I wouldn't know, since it's closed, and through reverse engineering I have been able to deal with them with OpenOffice.

What should be done is scrap .doc, ppt, etc. And make an properly open specification. So ANYONE can implement read/write of this format, and be accessible to ALL regardless of the whims of one corporation.

The whole point of MS's OOXML was to be compatible with it's older stuff, and as such (pointed out by the OP) only be able to be correctly implemented by MS. Now if they fix those issues, that's another story, and in that case I'd back it.

As for XML being slow... would this create a delay on current machines. I would claim no... Between CPU's and RAM, I'd say the bottleneck is getting the data off a hard drive...

[Hagar Delest]

Well, you're quite late, see here : Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard.

Many links inside that thread. The vote has been held beginning of September and the 'No' won. But the end of the story is next February for the final vote, depending on what has happened to the specs after the technical comments from the national bodies.

[BoyOfDestiny]

Well, you're quite late, see here : Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard.

Many links inside that thread. The vote has been held beginning of September and the 'No' won. But the end of the story is next February for the final vote, depending on what has happened to the specs after the technical comments from the national bodies.

Yeah, but better late then never The site the OP links to does cover this

http://www.noooxml.org/

[dhobbs]

What should happen is .doc should be opened. It's a very fine format, if only other programs could easily work with it (no 100KB+ OpenOffice .doc files). What people don't understand is that XML is by its very nature a very slow format. Applications that work with mostly XML are very slow when dealing with data, especially web apps. The slowest is usually a web app that runs on Java and stores data with XML.

For small, simple tasks (XHTML, etc.) XML is a great descriptive format. But for large files, I think it's the wrong direction.

XML is a standard that can be read by web browsers. If a public document is truly going to be public it should be available to people anywhere and the best way to do that is to publish it on the internet. Viewing a document online that is stored in a binary format would mean that a web browser would need an implementation for reading that format. Using XML removes that requirement.

[atlfalcons866]

I am sick of Microsoft. They are threatening to sue open source because it violates there patents. But what patents are they violating?

[Steveway]

It's the thought that counts.