| OOXML -- dead format walking? |
May 28, 2008
Microsoft's controversial OOXML document format is not going anywhere, observes Jason Brooks in a blog posting at eWEEK. Brooks points to discrepancies between the ISO-approved version of the format and that used in Office 2007 in suggesting that OOXML hardly measures up with ODF (Open Document Format).
First, some background. Microsoft has created an empire by controlling the formats used for office documents. With each Office "ugrade" comes a new proprietary format that traps documents, once opened, preventing them from being opened again in the old format. Thus, the Redmond giant holds documents hostage, keeping users on a perpetual upgrade treadmill. Unless you upgrade, you can't share documents with others. It's as simple as that.
You'd have thought consumers would have wised up by now, and started using simple text-based formats. But no. They just ask their manager to buy them the lastest version of Word or whatever. The system works all too well.
Charles Goldfarb figured it out, back at IBM in the 70s, and in response created SGML (standard generalized markup language). The idea was to create a framework for formats for all kinds of documents that would be both human- and machine-readable, and thus open to implementations from multiple vendors or organizations. The smart money saw the obvious benefits, and today the largest users of SGML and its simplified descendant, XML, include the U.S. government (IRS and census bureaus, especially), the publishing industry, and yes, Microsoft.
Microsoft has paid lip service for years to opening its file formats, and has even used "XML" based formats in recent products. But, against the spirit of the format, Microsoft's bastardized XML formats always embed closed binary objects as needed to obfuscate things. I believe the term is "embrace and extend."
Microsoft has not yet moved to open document formats, and you can bet it never will. Being non-interoperable is a cornerstone technique it has used to make its products de facto standards. And when you're a de facto standard, who cares about real standards?
Looked at from that perspective, it's no surprise that, as Jason finds, OOXML in its ISO-approved format is going nowhere at all. Heck, Microsoft itself will not even support it until mid-2009, Brooks suggests. And by then, official Office formats will have moved up to OOXML2 or whatever anyway.
Read Brooks' thoughts here.
-- Henry Kingman
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