Stephane Rodriguez Dismantles Open XML 188
Elektroschock writes "Stephane Rodriguez, a reengineering specialist who became popular for his article on MS Office 2007 binary data, now comprehensively debunks Microsoft's new Open XML format. With small case studies he demonstrates the impossible challenges third-party developers will face. His conclusion: it is 'defective by design.' Next week members of the International Standard Organization are likely to approve the format as a second official ISO standard for office documents, even though most nations have submitted comments. Rodriguez claims he is 'not affiliated to any pro-MS or anti-MS party/org[anization]/ass[ociation].'"
This is not proof of OOXML being defective by desi (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:4, Insightful)
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To go back and reiterate darkatom's comment: Microsoft has always taken 'standards' and extended them to break everyone else's version except theirs. Nothing has ever stopped them except a court order (like JAVA, maybe...) but if they don't dominate and control they always try to take their ball and go home. ("I'll see your JAVA and raise you an Active-X (who cares if it makes using the web uncontrollabl
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Microsoft's implementation becomes the de facto standard
No, I don't think so. It will serve Microsoft's purposes better if they too cannot properly implement the OOXML standard. Then their fully proprietary file formats would continue to be used since no one could trust that an OOXML document hasn't been corrupted by the OOXML save process.
This is how Microsoft destroyed the nascent RTF standard that the US Navy wanted to use: they implemented it, but gee there were problems in getting it to work right so maybe all you sailor boys should use Word's native fi
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I wonder what happens if OOXML is not voted a standard. Will MS simply discard it, and embrace ODF, or will they continue to use
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:5, Insightful)
> and all others must (attempt to) conform to the behavior of that implementation or
> be judged defective.
It's worse than that. Since MS defines a number of aspects of the specification solely
in terms of compliance with MS application software, the MS implementation is not only
the -defacto- standard, but the very explicit standard. Not only can no one conform
to a sufficient level to be judged compliant in the marketplace, for all contractual
specifications, -nothing- but MS software can -ever- be 100% compliant.
This means on big, contract driven projects, such as many government projects, MS
and vendors using MS tools are effectively the only possible competitors, unless
the contracts and specifications specifically waive vendor compliance with those
parts of the spec.
And I strongly doubt anyone would ever write a contract like that.
Standard (Score:2)
Didn't Java have a reference standard?
Two vendors can't even implement HTML to render the same results from a given set of pages, since default fonts, sizes, margins, padding, and so on for many elements are implementation dependent.
Just seems like another excuse (not that we need one) to bash MS...
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Didn't Java have a reference standard?
I believe you were able to get the source code for that though (under a "research" license or somesuch).
The real question, though, is how willing the vendor is to fix bugs in the reference implementation. If the vendor has intentionally made the standard incompatible with the reference implementation and/or is unwilling to bring the reference in line with the standard (or vice versa) and/or is unwilling to tell you what it is, exactly, that the reference is doing/expecting then you're out of luck. If, on t
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:5, Informative)
The document contains all of these. I suggest that you read it.
By the way -- there's newly discovered undocumented Microsoft tech present in OOXML, such as SSPI ("Security Service Provider Interface") which is a proprietary Microsoft developed protocol for security providers, and OLE ("Object Linking and Embedding") which is for embedding (eg, taking an Excel spreadsheet and putting it into a Word document). This is undefined in OOXML only available on Microsoft Windows.
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You're not coming up with some kind of revelation. It's more of a "Duh, no shit sherlock".
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There's a big difference between supporting platform specific IPC mechanisms in an application and integrating those mechanisms into file format that you claim can be implemented on other platforms.
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Also, Mac Office supports OLE as well, so it's not "Windows-only".
And you claime that OLE is "newly discovered"? It's been around for over 13 years, and was present in the very first OOXML specs.
I don't know about SSPI, but given that your OLE knowledge is so woeful, I feel safe in assuming that your SSPI complaint is FUD as well.
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Some are pro-Linux as you say.
Others are pro-BSD.
Still others are equally proprietary, from the OS X community for example.
What unites them? The ABM Treaty: Anything But Microsoft.
What part of "level playing field" and "conformance to standards developed in the traditional manner" (e.g. not the OOXML SUV-flanking movement) seems odd, biased, or unreasonable, Your Anonymity?
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, isnt the fact that not even Microsofts own software can handle OOXML which btw. is designed by Microsoft themselves, proof enough that something is seriously wrong with the design of OOXML?
I mean if not even the maker of OOXML can get it to work properly in its own products, how are third parties supposed to do it? And if no one is able to implement OOXML correctly, what is this "standard" good for besides being a great smoke-and-mirrors tactic by Microsoft themselves?
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:5, Insightful)
Smokescreen for Sharepoint (Score:5, Interesting)
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/mia/?p=198 [itbusinessedge.com]
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This "OpenXML" stunt is just a smokescreen covering Microsofts controlled retreat in the office format battle. It only needs to keep parties distracted until Microsoft has reclaimed the control over business content by means of vendor lockin v2.0 aka Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.
The problem is that while they note that Sharepoint leads to lock-in, and they suggest open source as an alternative, they don't mention anything specifically. That means there's no OSS equivalent or competitor to Sharepoint? Is it a roll-your-own situation? That can get really expensive too. Not every organization has the ability to fund that kind of development, with its associated risks, in the time-frame they have to get a solution in place. Unless someone comes up with an alternative that can fun
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http://www.alfresco.com/ [alfresco.com]
http://www.nuxeo.com/en/ [nuxeo.com]
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A DOC is actually a FAT12-like filesystem (called OLE) that has files and clusters. Clusters can be lost and files can be fragmented. One of the files is the document's text; it's not plaintext but rather another obscure binary format, with text chunks seperated by some kind of metadata (my brain nearly exploded when trying to understand how to separate text from the metadata and I gave up). Images, videos and embedded objects are stored as separate files in th
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since Sun doesn't use Java on a single one of their internal projects (it's banned by policy)
Sources please?
Is Java only for others to use? (Score:2)
I've heard that too, but I don't have a link. Can anyone help?
From a recent comment [slashdot.org]: My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sell
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Machine code is no protection.
Java's byte code is a coded list of instructions. (Score:2)
It is sometimes a bigger intellectual challenge disassembling or decompiling than writing the program yourself. I find disassembly a bit easier than decompilation, but of course it is very, very tedious. Decompilation of C (I've never decompiled C++.) is difficult for me because every little thing is a call to some other area of the program.
The byte code of pseudo-compiled languages like Java is just a coded list of the instructions the programmer wrote.
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Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:2, Insightful)
That's why the title says "Microsoft Office XML Formats? Defective by design"
not "OOXML defective by design"
He is dissing the Microsofts claims of transparency and openness of Microsoft Office XML
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not proof of OOXML being defective by design. It only shows that apparently MS's software isn't able to handle OOXML properly.
OK, lets have MS have their choice either way on this one.
If their office tools work well but are not using the OOXML spec, they must be using some other spec, perhaps MOOXML. In which case they are not OOXML compliant.
On the other hand, if they want to be OOXML compliant then I guess Redmond programmer can't read their own spec and thus are having problems being compliant.
Either way, and for whatever reason Microsoft is not compliant with their own spec. Shall we call this MOOXML? And while I have only read a part of the spec, it is far too "undefined" and thus ambiguous to be reliable used by itself. A standard needs to be defined enough, that 2 or more parties could take the standard document specifications, run off and program it from scratch. And have a reasonable chance that their code will inter operate on the same data sets.
Trouble is, if Microsoft cannot do that, how is anyone else?
But might I submit, Microsoft wrote office and then wrote the spec. A poster child of why you think about and write the spec before the software is a good practice.
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Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:4, Funny)
My guess is, yes, it occurred to the poster you were responding to, since I highly doubt that when he wrote exactly that, it was in his sleep. Did it occur to you that reading his post all the way to the end might have resulted in slightly less of your foot being inserted into your mouth?
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I believe it is the part where Microsoft is pretending that OOXML is an open standard and pretending that it is what is being implemented in Office 2007 that people are calling MS on.
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:5, Insightful)
If Office can't read OOXML files produced by other tools, and other tools can't read Office OOXML files, where do you suppose end users will place the blame?
And what do you suppose users will do when faced with incompatibilities?
It's a brilliant strategy: Define a new "standard" but don't quite implement it yourself, ensuring that no one can implement a competitive office suite that is compatible with yours. Further, make the standard complex and weird enough that you can always blame inconsistencies on the other implementations. Voila! You get to proclaim to the world that your de facto standard office suite supports an open, ISO-blessed international standard format -- but with no worries about losing your lock-in.
Re: Brilliant Strategies (Score:4, Insightful)
(Scene at office)
ComputerGuy: "Sure, let's open that with GoogleApps."
Colleague: "Why am I getting a catastrophic failure? Maybe I better use Excel."
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but Office can read OOXML files produced by other tools; You just have to generate proper files.
As its pointed out in this thread:
http://blogs.msd [msdn.com]
Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. Brilliant, isn't it. Given a horribly complex and incomplete specification, Microsoft can easily blame any problems on the other tools -- and they can do this with a straight face because they'll be right! (Quietly ignoring the fact that their own tool produces non-compliant OOXML). Even better, they can smugly point out how their tools fix the "errors" caused by other crappy tools, even as the text of their messages frighten users away from trying any tool that doesn't come from Microsoft ("catastrophic failure", no less!).
If MS weren't trying to pull a fast one, they'd have designed a more reasonable format, one that does make it practical to make small edits to the XML and expect reasonable results or, even better, used an existing standard like ODF. If ODF can't fully represent all facets of Office documents, the format has a well-defined technical and procedural path to add any necessary extensions.
By way of comparison, try the same series of experiments with a .ods document, using any of the handful of available applications that supports it, and you'll quickly see how a format that is designed to be straightforward, accessible and specifiable in less than 500 pages compares to the brilliantly-executed monstrosity that is OOXML.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
On the other hand, a rather lengthy list of objections against the standard itself can be found here:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objection
So it seems that both the standard and its implementation suck
I disagree (Score:2)
Other complaints are with the format itself, such as numerous different ways of marking up the same thing; dependencies hidden in various files instead of listed up front (forcing a parsing of the entire zip file to make a trivial change); inclusion of proprietary, undocumented, or partially documented parts, like VML; including assinine legacy structure, like the way dates are improperly stored, and on and on.
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What implementation is that? They don't have an implementation. OOXML is a sham. MS Office does not, nor will it ever, implement OOXML. The existence of OOXML, which offers rivals to many existing standards (like ISO 8601, 639, 8632, 26300, 10118-3 and W3C SVG, MathML, XML-ENC, and SMIL) is justified by the backwards compatability argument under the pretense of helping Microsoft to document its existing document format, which it doesn't. There are two valid paths here: create
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Basically, many of his arguments could be said about ODF (though not all), since ODF doesn't provide a standard way to do those things, they
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Would application-level encryption be useful ? (Score:2)
I remain to be convinced that encryption is a useful concept at the application level. (Note : this is a challenge ; convince me!)
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Disingeneous (Score:5, Informative)
-Q(1) What does Rodriguez's article show?
-Q(2) is OOXML in and by itself flawed?
-Q(3) What's the practical relevance of the question whether OOXML is flawed?
-Q(4) So what's in it for Microsoft? Why do they bother?
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- Q(1) : What does Rodriguez's article show?
- A(1) : Rodriguez's article show that the OOXML format written by latest Microsoft Office applications, among them MS Excel, is:
- sorely defective in that you can't be sure to get your original data back after saving it to OOXML
- impossible to change outside MS Office applications
- tied to the MS Office way of representing internationalised versions of documents because "of the way Microsoft chose to store XML using the US English locale, no matter how good your implementation is, you have to retrofit it to work just like Office does" in order to accommodate internationalised documents
- MS Office legacy formats supported throughout, greatly (and unnecessarily) contributing to the size and complexity of the 6,000 page standard.
- Q(2): Is OOXML flawed in and by itself?
- A(2):Yes, I think so, partly because of Rodriguez's article, partly because of flaws documented elsewhere: see http://www.noooxml.org/petition [noooxml.org] The points 2,3,4,5 listed there seem especially crippling to me:
(2) There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
(3) There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
(4) More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
(5) There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;
- Q(3): What's the practical relevance of the question whether OOXML is flawed?
- A(3): Enormous. We currently see that Microsoft is trying to convince the world to accepted OOXML as an ISO "standard", whereas it's no such thing. It's too loosely defined, and opposed to the existing Opendoc standard there is no open-source reference implementation. So there will be a morass of possible implementations, of which only Microsoft's own implementations will be guaranteed mutually compatible. That's a polite way of saying that Microsoft simply aims at continuing its format lock-in, only this time the under the name of OOXML.
- Q(4) : So what's in it for Microsoft? Why do they bother?
- A(4) : Well ... Microsoft has a policy whereby it quite explicitly does not want other people's software, let alone Open Source software, to render MS Office documents correctly.
For reference, see this email, (cited from Rodriguez's article):
Is that
Do they have any intention...? (Score:2)
The question is whether they have any intention of supporting it "properly".
I say the answer is a big "no". Their XML is just a thin ASCII veneer applied to their existing format.
The only reason for making OOXML it was political, they never had any intention of it being useful to anybody except Microsoft.
Users of OOXML will be just as locked in to Office as if they kept right on using the old binary format.
Personally.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998
To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky
Subject : Office rendering
One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.
We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.
I would be glad to explain at a greater length.
Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.
I'm not saying this as some linux nut job but its things like that which just drive me nuts. Regardless of which ever os I prefer that kind of thinking just boils my blood.
How can any committee deciding on open standards seriously take a company which has been proven time and time again to play by its own rules and whenever it offers something labeled OPEN its about as open as the doors to Fort Knock are to the average person.
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>proven time and time again to play by its own rules and whenever it offers something labeled
>OPEN its about as open as the doors to Fort Knock are to the average person.
Plain and simple, arm twisting and blackmail, though both are no doubt couched in far more polite and legal-sounding terms. Microsoft-apology has become the dominant counter-culture on Slashdot of recent. But the fact remains that in spite of
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Can you show us any evidence Bill Gates has changed his mind on this in the past nine years?
Re:Personally.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes.
Didn't you read the original article? Haven't you been following the OOXML story at all? There is every evidence that Microsoft has not changed, and works hard to pervert standards and processes to favor their platform over any other. Not just here, but in other areas, as well. Name one major Microsoft product that follows open, published standards without proprietary deviation. Just one. I dare you.
Also important to note, Bill Gates isn't running MS anymore.
No. Ballmer is. Bill Gates is a very smart guy (in business, at least). Ballmer is vicious, and even more cold-blooded than Gates (if that can be possible). And the corporation idolizes Gates. His influence will remain long after he's completely retired from the company.
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I bet you've never changed your opinion about anything in the last 9 nine years and are exactly the same person after all this time.
Why, of course, I reserve the right to change my opinion on a daily basis, or as Konrad Adenauer put it Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern? (English translation) [wikiquote.org]
Microsoft Corporation unfortunately has done absolutely nothing in the past 9 years that made me rethink my opinion about them.
Hint: Calling Linux and the general public license a cancer doesn't help.
ODF specifies ASCII number IEEE float value? (Score:2)
Other than that, most of the other stuff he talks about is rather damning.
Re:ODF specifies ASCII number IEEE float value? (Score:4, Informative)
<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1">
<table:table-cell/>
−
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="123456.123456789">
<text:p>123456.12</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
</table:table-row>
Reasonable and Sane? Not from M$. (Score:2, Interesting)
Separating the value and the display solves the problem. As long as the value stored is preserved, other programs can work with it without introducing arbitrary changes. That M$ does not store the exact value and relies on the reader to make the same rounding error is crazy. It's a trap for every system that is not M$, and might not even work across different processors for M$.
I've run into this problem in my own work, where it did not matter. A data acquisition system I used required Winblows. It cou
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Did I just eat too many syrup coated waffles? He's telling me the rounding error is 10^-4 or 10^-5 on values with more trailing nines than I can count between sugary blinks. Not long ago I came across a slide presentation from a HEP lab concerning C++0x with a slide proclaiming that decimal floating point in hardware was the wave of the future. Now while I don't see any numerical advantage to this change, it will probably reduce the number of floating point gurus who gouge their own eyes out after rubbi
Re:ODF specifies ASCII number IEEE float value? (Score:4, Informative)
So, there are numbers that floating point formats do not represent well. However, the world is not floating point numbers. And computer math is not just floating point numbers.
The number is stored in the XML as an ASCII represented decimal real number. They're not stored as binary floating point numbers and they shouldn't have the kind of brain damageness that floating point has.
Let's look at what's going on here.
User enters a number in a decimal format. User sees the number in a decimal format displayed on the screen. Excel apparently does not use floating point or it's got a lot of compensation because if you do things like multiple 12345.12345 * 100000000 you get 1234512345000 and not some weird approximation. I would guess that the XML output routine is using floating point (and why would be a good question).
Why is this a problem? Well, we don't know how many digits of precision to work with here or how to round things. If I write an app to work with the spreadsheet I'd probably use something like a Java BigDecimal to handle the numbers. But, I don't know how to round things out so that I get the right numbers. If I use a BigDecimal, 12345.123449999999 is going to be 12345.123449999999. If I multiple by 100000000 I will get 123451234499.99999 instead of 1234512345000 as I would expect from looking at the values that were put into the spreadsheet.
Excel should be putting the proper values out in the XML or the standard should define the form of rounding/conversion to be applied.
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I agree with all that, but I think you're missing something very fundamental: the purpose of a document format is to encode what the user did and what it means. This is the reason why the details of binary floating point arithmetic are irrelevant in this context, and their use in the file a flaw: if the user typed "1234.1234" in the document, the user meant 1234.1234, and the file better guarantee me, author of a program that reads it, that I can find out for sure that the user meant 1234.1234. The trivia
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You expect to get that stored exactly in the ANSI characters of the XML file.
And you can store IEEE floating point numbers exactly using ASCII characters.
(after all, you can code binary as a series of ASCII "0"s and "1"s)
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We've had lots of well tested relatively fast bignum libraries for years. Introducing rounding errors in a spreadsheet without being explicitly told by the user that such errors are allowed is absolutely unacceptable.
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This method is not documented in the standard. Thus *other* programs that want to read Excel-files have to resort to guesswork to do a very basic thing that Excel does: Display a number that was entered by the user, the way the user entered it.
This means if we both get sent a valid OOXML-document, and yo
Can anyone repro? (Score:2, Interesting)
I bet Mr. Stephane is not saving the sheel xml in utf-8.
The header of the xml file says its utf-8, but he might be saving it without the UTF-8 BOM header.
Re:Can anyone repro? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Can anyone repro? (Score:4, Informative)
So? It's still perfectly valid XML even without the BOM. XML it's a real standard and I suggest you read it, it's not Notepad.
And don't even start talking about malformed UTF-8 since he only used characters in the ASCII subset, so even saving it as Latin-1 would have generated valid XML.
Re:Can anyone repro? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the advantages of UTF-8 for text files is that you don't need a BOM. With XML it's even easier because, as you point out, the XML declaration ("XMLDecl" in the spec) header can contain the "EncodingDecl" to tell explicitly you the file is in UTF-8. If the EncodingDecl says UTF-8, and the file is encoded in UTF-8, then if an XML parser cannot handle that, it's seriously fucked an needs to be fixed.
You might also want to go read STD-63 at some point. It points out that there are a few problems with using BOMs in UTF-8, and that if there is a way for UTF-8 to be determined in a way other than with the use of a BOM, that should be used instead. Given that XML specifically includes support for an "EncodingDecl" in the "XMLDecl", it is clear that best practices dictate that you *shouldn't* use a BOM when working with UTF-8 encoded XML files. Even if your tools _insist_ on writing BOMs to such files, they had *better* still be able to work if the BOM is missing.
Heck, with OOXML, you could also use the ZIP's manifest file to keep track of file metadata like the character encoding.
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What the fuck is the point of a byte-order-mark on an encoding that is byte-order neutral?
So you know what the character encoding is, just like STD 63 aka RFC 3629 explains. It's not a very good method of specifying the character encoding, but it's better than not saying anything at all, which most text files do. Whenever there's another method, as there is in XML, you should use it (without the BOM), but there often is no other way to specify the character encoding.
I remember a time when I was working on a UTF-8 text file with lots of characters that weren't ASCII-compatible. One day I opened
Defective by Design (Score:2)
Some Points Are Valid, Others Not (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, the part about "Entered versus stored values" is certainly valid (though I wonder if that's not a problem with Excel itself, and not the format). The complaint about the date format is also on the money.
However, other things seem either wrong or have a bias towards hand editing of the files, e.g. "International, but US English first and foremost". He complains that it uses U.S. English settings. He may not like the U.S., but it's called picking a canonicalized format. Consider the alternative for implementing this in software, parsing of the values in the XML would now depend on settings also found in the XML. That would be insane.
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He may not like the U.S., but it's called picking a canonicalized format. Consider the alternative for implementing this in software, parsing of the values in the XML would now depend on settings also found in the XML. That would be insane.
Here's a reference to XML DTDs [w3schools.com]. This is exactly what should be used to defining localized formula names etc. With XML, you might not be able to do much with it, but given a 'real', properly defined XML format, it should at *least* be possible to parse all the information in the damn thing!!
Why use a DTD?
XML provides an application independent way of sharing data. With a DTD, independent groups of people can agree to use a common DTD for interchanging data. Your application can use a standard DTD to verify that data that you receive from the outside world is valid. You can also use a DTD to verify your own data.
A lot of forums are emerging to define standard DTDs for almost everything in the areas of data exchange. Take a look at: CommerceNet's XML exchange and http://www.schema.net./ [www.schema.net]
Where is a DTD referenced? That's right, at the top of the XML file.
Re: US English not "canonical" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you intended it that way, but you should be aware of the vast number of people you just insulted. US English and US dates are only "canonical" in the minds of US citizens. If not for Microsoft purposely and determinedly screwing up the implementation of anything but US standards in their software the usage would have no traction at all.
The majority of the "English speaking" world still uses the English language and English formats and standards, not US variant ones. The fact that the USA has seen fit to re-invent English, still refer to that as English, and then foist it on the rest of the world doesn't make it "canonical."
As the author of this article so aptly describes, date formats and language implementations are a multi-stage nightmare in Office. To the point that the majority of users even in English speaking countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK itself, often end up using American English and American dates simply because Office is the only game in town and you cna only bash your head against the wall on these things for so long. That doesn't make it right, and that doesn't mean that those users wouldn't be happier and more productive if they were not forced to use a US standard when they may have not even traveled to the US.
Any kind of English except the US variant, is severely broken in Office and always has been. Your answer sounds to me a lot like: "So what, they should all be using our standards and language anyway." Not helpful at all, and illogical as well.
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As a manager of mine once said, sometimes people TAKE offense. They take it where none was given. Sometimes people are looking to be offended - I suspect that's true in your case.
A CANONICAL format is generally preferred for storing data (e.g. storing time in GMT and then adjusting for local time). MS picked U.S. English as the canonical format for OOXML. They could
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Foresight (Score:4, Informative)
Err.. Next week news called, they want their draft story back.
There is no certain outcome of next weeks vote; and the fact that we even are discussing the defects of OOXML are proof that the ISO body will have much problems just waiving this through. Please refrain from taking sides just because this is an 'Microsoft-standard'.
I'd say it's possible that OOXML will NOT be approved next week. It will probably have to take the long road through the ISO as a real standard proposal, not just a fast-tracked 6000 page gorilla.
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Call me a cynic (Score:3, Insightful)
OOXML will be voted in as an ISO standard.
Third party vender's trying to implement the "standard" will waste time, money and effort and accomplish nothing of import.
MS will continue as normal, claiming support for open standards while locking anyone they can into formats/software they own.
ODF will continue as a marginalized format used by people on the "fringe".
You called it (Score:2)
I've been burned by a poorly written XML specification before, which was tightly coupled to one ve
item #1 seems a bit ridiculous (Score:2)
Well, duh!
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Some of his other points look good, though, and in any case, it just strains credulity that Microsoft would
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Then we could judge if his example is reasonable or not. I realize we could all do this ourselves, but I for one am not going to go out and buy Excel 2007 just to do that!
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I think it's the only way to interpret his point that is consistent with his own presentation of it. I'm not exaggerating or constructing a strawman. He was quite clear about his expectations: He wanted to open a spreadsheet document and make any changes that seemed simple and reasonable to him, without needing to read the spec, and he wanted the result to be conformant OOXML.
Not so much. (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead, he has to go update all the reference and dependency information, which programs have to generate and update all the time anyway. I can't really think of a good reason this information needs to be saved to disk, and I certainly can't think of a good reason that Excel deletes the cell, rather than updating the dependencies itself to reflect the physical document.
In fact, I can't t
Except he doesnt. (Score:4, Informative)
Stephane has for a long time presented a weak case against OpenOffice XML.
"1) Self-exploding spreadsheets"
His top issue "1) Self-exploding spreadsheets" has been discussed on Brian Jones' weblog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/ 15/why-there-s-no-microsoft-in-open-xml.aspx [msdn.com]
It boils down to: the fact that is XML does not mean that you can modify it in any way you want; There are rules for modifying the schema and Mr Stephane is not happy with that. Had he followed the actual rules he would have had no issue.
This is a case where two locations must be updated per the spec; He can avoid updating the two locations by removing the chainCalc.xml file (which is optional, and Excel will reconstruct). He later gets upset because if he does that, he claims performance on load will be slower.
"2) Entered versus stored values"
His second point in "2) Entered versus stored values" in an interesting distinction between entered values and stored values. It reflects the way that Excel works (and so does Gnumeric) by storing the values instead of the data that was entered by the user. This responds to the need of the spreadsheet to do something interesting with the data, for example when you enter a date, it is stored as a number with a format applied not as a string. This allows computations on dates to happen based on the underlying numeric value. The featured is used extensively by spreadsheets.
In the Excel/gnumeric case you have to generate a single value, in the ODF case you must generate and update the two values (which just a point before, Stephane was having a seizure about).
The precision issue that he brings up, I suspect is merely an issue with double format precision. He claims that the data is unusable and there is a loss of precision, but handing that out to a C compiler will produce the expected result with no loss of precision. I do not know how "atof" or the compiler work internally to cope with this issue, but at least my libc/gcc combo does not have this problem.
I would not be surprised if this is an artifact of floating point, someone with more background on doubles and floating point math could probably answer the question with more authority, but a cursory read of "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating Point" seems to validate that there is no error in the floating point representation for the values that he uses: http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h tml [sun.com]
3) Optimization artefacts become a feature instead of an embarrasment
His 3rd point is open for debate, like the 1st case, we have a case where he has to handle things differently. Stephane sells a commercial product to handle Excel files and I suspect that his product has to cope with the same patterns in different ways, which has naturally upset him. OOXML might be inspired by Excel's needs, but it does not mean that it has to be a 1-to-1 match.
4) VML isn't XML
VML is labeled as "deprecated" in the OOXML documentation (Section 8.6.2, page 25) and it states: "The VML format is a legacy format originally introduced with Office 2000 and is included and fully defined in this Standard for backwards compatibility reasons. The DrawingML format is a newer and richer format created with the goal of eventually replacing any uses of VML in the Office Open XML formats. VML should be considered a deprecated format included in Office Open XML for legacy reasons only and new applications that need a file format for drawings are strongly encouraged to use preferentially DrawingML."
So the standard basically says "VML is still in use, but its better to use DrawingML". Stephane misconstrues the above statement and tries to portray this as evil
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I also wish that Stephane didn't have such an obvious chip on his shoulder. Its completely destroying his credibility, and making him come to some incredibly sloppy conclusions.
I took at look at his examples. "The calc chain doesn't work if you modify the data". Oh wow. You mean, the
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Speak for yourself.
The fact that you can not, does not mean that real hackers or professionals can not. For instance, those that are actually implementing support for it on various project do not seem to share your opinion.
There are real problems with the specs and real limitations that must be addressed, and a lot of great feedback is being sen
Re:I see Miguel has flown in fast to defend Micros (Score:3, Informative)
Cal
blond blunder (Score:2)
Great Doubt (Score:2)
If they agree to this it will simply be plain evidence that they are being influenced or the members are not competent. I'm of the opinion that they need to force a delay between
The same can be said for OO.o's handling of ODF (Score:2)
http://develop.opendocumentfellowship.org/testsuit e/summary.html [opendocume...owship.org]
Also, OO.o adds things to its files that are outside of the ODF spec. If MSO's files aren't true OOXML files, then OO.o's files aren't true ODF files either.
Same situation as many other standard formats, such as HTML. Different apps handle formats differently, and often not 100% faithful to the spec.
Re:Surely this is she, or he/she (Score:4, Informative)
Stéphane is a French male name. The female version is Stéphanie.
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That's half right. The Spanish version is Esteban. For many more national variants, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven [wikipedia.org].
So yeah, Stéphane Rodriguez has a French first name and a Spanish last name.
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Hardly looks like the /. effect.
We did. (Score:2)
But it wasn't completely compatible. It couldn't actually save a Word document, so it would save to RTF when people told it to, so they would stop getting req
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