Microsoft Releases First Open XML SDK 120
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."
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.
An API is useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Lay back and receive your SDK (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
ISO should read this over and over, 1000 times (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An API is useless (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.) These can convert, sometimes via intemediate formats, to formats like RTF and thus to anything, or just printed to Postscript and distilled to PDF.
Has to look 100% exactly as the original? Install the old software, print, scan. Anything that ran on a PC-XT can still run on a Pentium. Any old OS can run in emulation.
A while ago I had to convert a database from a proprietary Chinese DOS format to Excel in Unicode. Took a couple of hours to find and work out how to install the old software, then it was just a few clicks to export and convert it.
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.
Please don't call it Open XML (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, just call it OOXML.
I missed something (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
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.
Microsoft provides SDKs for lots of its technologies because it wants to make it simpler for its development community to use them. Most of these SDKs primarily target DotNet because that's the primary development platform that Microsoft wants people to write Windows apps in. The fact that this SDK exists in theory doesn't preclude someone else from writing an equivalent SDK for another platform, certainly if the actual OOXML specification is as adequate as the ISO has already declared it to be (pending the appeals process). Personally I don't think the OOXML specification is adequate for such purposes, but I can't see how a Microsoft-provided SDK has anything to do with that, or why it should be of any interest to the ISO. It's entirely another issue.
An API like this is potentially even a good thing. Granted that it gives Microsoft direct control over whether third party developers will write malformed formats that are incompatible with the standard, and they seem to actually be doing that. But it's also encouraging developers not to duplicate their own code for reading and writing document formats, and tying themselves into specific details of an XML spec. If apps are built around an API like this one, which they certainly will be now that it's available, it would (theoretically) make it much easier to port them to work with alternative document formats in the future. Who knows? Microsoft might one day even update the code behind its API to generically support more formats than just OOXML -- especially if they're acutally serious about supporting OASIS in the future.
Yeah it could be Microsoft trying to subvert the process again, but it could also simply be that Microsoft's a gigantic corporation, and that some parts of it don't necessarily work in sync with other parts of it. This is perhaps even to the extent that they might try to provide useful things from time to time without the malicious intent that could have been preferred from the ruling upper levels in the hierarchy.
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.
Re:An API is useless (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course $10 is ad hoc. We can negotiate for 10 million. Generally you have a lot of documents in a similar format. Might take a few hours, or at most days, to work out a method, then they can all be done en masse. Or with a little bit more work, create a custom app to convert transparently on demand. In any case, it's not a "crisis". It's a quite trivial procedure. One good thing is that 1980s documents didn't usually have any deliberate DRM. When people in decades to come try to convert current media with weird features specifically designed to prevent "unauthorised" access, that's when it'll be expensive.
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.
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.
Re:continue the charade, but we dont buy it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MO2K7OXML, not Open XML (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What is the "ratified" version? (Score:3, Insightful)