Slashdot Log In
Microsoft Releases First Open XML SDK
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jun 13, 2008 09:14 PM
from the appeals-what-appeals dept.
from the appeals-what-appeals dept.
Kurtz'sKompund tips us to news that Microsoft has released a finished version of the Open XML software development kit. Microsoft has made additional resources available with the download. Quoting Techworld:
"The SDK includes an application programming interface (API) simplifying the creation of code for searching documents, creating documents, validating document parts, modifying data and other tasks, Microsoft said. The API can be used in any language supported by the Microsoft .Net Framework, the company said. The current SDK supports the version of Open XML supported by Office 2007, which is not the same as that ratified as a standard by the ISO, due to changes effected during the ratification process."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
http://www.imagegenerator.net/93941/ [imagegenerator.net]
Please don't call it Open XML (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, just call it OOXML.
Parent
Re:Please don't call it Open XML (Score:5, Funny)
Not only does it reinforce the concept that this is a product of Microsoft, it has amusing cow connotations.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
MO2K7OXML, not Open XML (Score:5, Informative)
For all we know, the next version of Office will support the officially defined and documented standard, which will have hundreds of changes compared to the current O2K7 format of Open XML. Thus, everyone will have to recode all new stuff just to stay in sync. A wasted effort, in my opinion.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Very little in the way of wasted effort. What this needs is a promise that Office 2007 and this API will be synced to the ISO specification.
Re:MO2K7OXML, not Open XML (Score:5, Informative)
No, promises are easily broken by MS, we need it to sync to the ISO specs, not a promise. Think of all the other promises MS has made... We promise that Vista will be innovative, new, fast, out soon, etc. We promise that we will embrace an open Internet (well until we manage to kill Netscape that is...) We promise that OS/2 is the future. And more. MS has been full of promises but has never managed to fulfill any of the ones that help anyone.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:MO2K7OXML, not Open XML (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what this needs is a promise that this API will be synced to ODF as well as Office XML/OOXML
This is Microsoft's first attack on ODF on their platform. They were forced to grudgingly support the format in Office, now they are attempting to marginalise it by building an infrastructure around Office XML/OOXML.
The end result will be that customers already locked in to Microsoft with tools like .NET and Sharepoint will only be able to interoperate with Office XML/OOXML, not ODF. Anyone wishing to interoperate with them will be forced to make the same decision
This is an attack on ODF, an attempt to turn it into an orphan format. It will be half-heartedly supported in Office to appease regulators, but unsupported through the rest of the MS ecosystem.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Others have said no, it needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Others have said no, it needs (x) so let me add one.
No, it needs to be ignored. Let's talk to the customers on this one.
A businessman's hope for his business is that it persist and grow for several decades at least, until he can reap his reward and exit phenomenally wealthy. If you architect your business intelligence on the platform of a corporation whose business model is to obsolete its platforms every five years at the most, you're an idiot and you deserve to be have your resources drained by this decade's P.T. Barnum until in the ferocious environment of the day you and your grand ideas are forgotten.
In the public sector the objective is to conduct the public's business in such a way that resources are not wasted and required openness can be delivered. It's essential that the public's investment in creating information is well preserved. If you're in the public sector and architect public infrastructure on such a platform as Office 2007 OXML you're worse than incompetent - you're a traitor to the cause of public service.
OOXML is irrelevant. The problem of construction of a document is solved. The user interface is an interesting diverse field where members compete but all the options that don't lead to truly open documents are blind alleys. Office 2007 formats are some of these blind alleys that will yield only wasted efforts because the vendor needs to obsolete your documents every five years in order to maintain its current cash flow. If you succeed in hitching your cart to this train it will come off its rails in less than five years when the provider needs to sell you new applications. Why would you do that? Trust me, if you're in public service and you choose to do that eventually somebody is going to follow the money right to you. Have you got longer than that to retirement? If you're in business the problem will solve itself and not to your benefit.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Paper vs de facto (Score:5, Insightful)
Because anyone who follows Microsoft knows the game is to never have the two match.
continue the charade, but we dont buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody but the people you pay to think otherwise is fooled.
Re:continue the charade, but we dont buy it. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you have some misperceptions here.
It's a handful of european countries appealing a decision to a standards body against microsoft over an issue which places the credibility of that standards body in jeopardy.
The standards body still has the upper hand here. Granted their officials could still be on the MS payroll, but whether or not the ISO is considered legitimate 3 months or so from now is entirely in their court.
open office and star office are both very good alter
Re:oh no an appeal.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but Microsoft only has a product to sell there in the first place by the grace of those countries' copyright laws. Since they are the sovereign entities, not Microsoft, if Microsoft tried to pull that kind of stunt they'd be well within their rights to simply declare Microsoft's software to be Public Domain and use it all they want!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
An API is useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An API is useless (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, your goals are noble, but your claims are invalidated by reality.
Parent
Re:An API is useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually reality validates my statement. The is a current crisis in both the public and private sector about digital documents from the 80s not being accessible because the document format is no longer supported and and there are no readers for them.
This may sound odd to you, but "marketshare" is not the answer to every question. All too often, it is a short sighted answer to complex issues.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Crisis? Give me $10 and I'll convert any "digital document from the 80s" you throw at me.
I've been doing DTP for 20 years. All the tools I used back in the 80s still work. (Clunky, based on DOS or Win 3.1, or Mac OS 7, but they still work without too much hassle. Adobe File Utilities for instace.)
Re:An API is useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, but should we have to pay *you* or someone like you for every instance of a document that can not be read?
An ad-hoc solution for a specific document is not a solution for the over all problem.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
As Linus said: "Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it".
Which is a way of saying that you can find just about [abandonwarering.com] anything [doslife.org] on the Internet. [vetusware.com] (From a moral, if perhaps not technically legal, point of view, you have the "bitrotted" originals and these are "backups".)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And what colour pony do you want?
The problem is legacy documents. No amount of lecturing people about what they should have done, if indeed anyone who created them is still around 20 years later, will do any good. Obviously, if people paid attention, they would not repeat
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I use plain ASCII for as much as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
Sweet, I take you have an Amstrad 3" disk drive then.
That's a piece of hardware. Not a document. But I'd refer you to someone like http://www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/ [dataserve-retro.co.uk] just as a courtesy.
Lay back and receive your SDK (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
How do these lying fucks live with themselves??? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a steaming pile of bullshit! First off, it hasn't really been ratified yet, ahem. Second, the draft that Microsoft submitted did not match the version used in Office 2007, before any changes were made.
Not An ISO Standard (Score:5, Informative)
> the same as that ratified as a standard by the ISO
No version of Microsoft's "Open XML" has been ratified as a standard by the ISO.
API can be used in any language... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Mono (Score:2)
I will ask a single working, commercial application coded and shipped to OS X scene thanks to Mono or a single vendors end user application which is available on Linux thanks to Mono
I'm not familiar with the OS X software scene, but w.r.t Linux there are many widely-used applications written in Mono. To claim otherwise is just ignorance. Thanks to Wikipedia for the following selection of popular mono applications for Linux (some Linux-only, some cross-platform):
Re: (Score:2)
This SDK can be used by any language, as long as it's a language of MS!
ISO should read this over and over, 1000 times (Score:5, Insightful)
It's irrelevant to the ISO (Score:3, Insightful)
Can you be more specific about why? It's the OOXML specification which the ISO is concerned with. An available SDK has little to do with whether OOXML is a suitable document specification one way or the other, as far as I can tell.
Micro
Re:It's irrelevant to the ISO (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, everything in DotNet is implemented in a proprietary dev environment. This has nothing to do with the openness of standards being implemented. Setting aside your initial claim that the ISO is supposed to validate a standard as being free of patents (which I don't believe to be true), the GP post seemed to be trying to claim that the fact that Microsoft happens to be providing a DotNet SDK has some kind of relevance to this standard not being open.
The DotNet API is not "the" API. It's an API that Microsoft provides. Furthermore this API, nor any other API for OOXML is the standard -- it's just a method of using the standard. The fact that Microsoft has created an API to help some of their paying customers to manage OOXML documents more easily really has nothing to do with whether OOXML is a good standard. The standard -- good or bad -- is the definition of the format, not the method of accessing it.
Microsoft provides DotNet APIs for working with standards such as SMTP, TCP/IP, HTML, GZip, and a whole host of standards that probably everyone would agree are open. Do you think this somehow compromises their open-ness? It also provides DotNet APIs for a heap of things that aren't open, or are even very Microsoft-specific. But it's not the presence of Microsoft APIs that makes those standards closed -- it's the fact that the standards aren't clearly published in a way that allows them to be implemented.
It's actually valid to argue that nobody else can write a valid API based on the specification, but this doesn't seem to be what either yourself or the GP post, or most of the responses to this article for that matter, are doing. Trying to draw some kind of imaginary causation between the standard being broken and Microsoft happening to provide a method of using it more easily on its own platform is ridiculous.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What is the "ratified" version? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I missed something (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
But since this SDK is based on the Office 2007 implementation which isn't the spec that went through ISO, the one that has been named Open XML, and the one that isn't actually a standard anyway.... erm... I think this would be better described as an "Office Open XML SDK"!
Hope that clears up any confusion!
I didn't know XML was closed... (Score:5, Funny)
Tags (Score:2)