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.docx apparently meets the standards, but in an open source unfriendly way.
.docx *is* an open xml standard that is human readable in a text editor, but the language MS uses in the license for .docx basically means it can't be used in GPL software.

To me that makes it useless as a document standard.
I suspect open source word processors will have filters for .docx - but the filters can't be GPL which will be a huge problem for word processors that are GPL because distributions won't be able to distribute GPL word processors with the non GPL filter - so users will have to get the plugin for .docx elsewhere (not from the distribution CD).

At least that's my understanding of it.

Basically MS is intentionally doing stuff to make things hard for GPL.
I hope they go down in flames.

Duke Stratosphere wrote:

What's the big deal? AppleWorks 6 comes with System X and reads Word files. WordPad comes with Windows and reads them too. Just who can't read what? Any XML file should be readable in Firefox, whether it's Open Office XML or what.

.docx is different than .doc

And no, firefox can not read any xml file.
It needs to know how to properly render it, which involves more than just loading a dtd.

Damn kids, in my day we only had one 10 point monospaced font and we liked it.

resedit wrote:

Duke Stratosphere wrote:

What's the big deal? AppleWorks 6 comes with System X and reads Word files. WordPad comes with Windows and reads them too. Just who can't read what? Any XML file should be readable in Firefox, whether it's Open Office XML or what.

.docx is different than .doc

I'm confident that Microsoft can smurf up XML at least as well as they smurfed up Java and Javascript.

resedit wrote:

And no, firefox can not read any xml file.
It needs to know how to properly render it, which involves more than just loading a dtd.

It shouldn't involve any more than loading a DTD and a CSS, I wouldn't think. I mean, it does, but everything else involved should be handled in the Firefox (or any browser) program. I haven't played with XML all that much, so I really can't say for sure, though.

Seems to me like a PDF ought to be sufficient for government work anyway, and would be better for documents that people need to print.

Duke Stratosphere wrote:

It shouldn't involve any more than loading a DTD and a CSS, I wouldn't think. I mean, it does, but everything else involved should be handled in the Firefox (or any browser) program. I haven't played with XML all that much, so I really can't say for sure, though.

Nonsense.

XML is not solely a web technology.

Any type of file format can (theoretically) be implemented in XML.

SVG images, for example, are perfectly valid XML files, but Firefox didn't somehow automatically support them just because it knows how to parse XML. It took a lot of hard programming, and I think even today you need a special build.

Similarly, in order to preserve compatibility and make conversion simple, Word XML files will simply be plain-text XML representations of the internal structure of Word documents.

Other companies will still have to program their own implementations of the Word format. It'll just require less reverse-engineering to do it now.

MathML is XML but it will not display properly in Mozilla unless you have the write fonts installed, and the only reason it does when you do (and there are some bugs) is because of code in Mozilla specifically for the MathML specification.

A file being xml does not mean it will automagically work in a program that parses xml.
That's only true if the program understands how to display the parsed xml for the specific type of xml being used.

Last edited by resedit (2006-01-03 12:47 am)

Or macs? They should all switch to macs.

Duke Stratosphere wrote:

This thread has me all confused. Here's why, I think...

Quinn had been behind a drive to change state computers so that they would no longer store documents in proprietary formats such as those used by Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes.

At first I was thinking that they're just talking about income tax forms and stuff like that for people to download, print, fill out and mail in. I suppose this means that the engineers who design bridges and such can't use autoCAD any more, because it uses a proprietary format? This guy's brainstorm is to outlaw Microsoft Word in every state office just because its file format is proprietary?

Under a proposal drafted by Quinn’s Information Technology Division (ITD), in 2007, the state would begin a move to the OpenDocument file format, an open, XML-based format used by a variety of products including IBM Workplace and StarOffice.

So everyone who works for the state is going to have to ditch Office and Lotus notes and learn how to use Workplace and StarOffice? I think this Quinn guys a loony toon the more I read the article. But, on the other hand...

mahakali wrote:

Some people need to work with more than one application and some even have to work on multiple platforms. Having an open-document format means they'll be (much) less likely to encounter screwed-up documents and will save them time and energy currently spent on converting and fixing docs.

I'm not so sure about that. I tried out OpenOffice and it was a giant pain in the ass. You couldn't even copy anything in it and paste it into a normal application (like Word, for instance) running under System X. I mean, it's still a neat program, and I'm all for open source and open document but I think it's crazy and stupid to force everyone who works for the state (or anywhere else, for that matter) to give up using programs that aren't open source. The fact of the matter is that people are used to using certain programs and shouldn't have to learn a new one just because this Quinn guy thinks it's cool. Shouldn't be forced to use Office or Lotus Notes either. I don't know, it looks like a big stink over nothing to me.

Umm… OpenOffice is an application. We're talking about document formats, not apps.

Iirc you need X11 to run OpenOffice in OS X. That might've been the culprit (why it was running slow).

The open document format does not rely on one application only (hence the name!). I don't think it's much of a learning curve for the users to switch to OpenDoc. Some apps (they might've been using) support OpenDoc. So far, is there any of the employees complains about it?

I don't know why you're against Quinn's migrating to open document format. Maybe he does that so the state wouldn't have to pay MS Office licensing fees each year.

Last edited by mahakali (2006-01-03 3:34 am)

1. PDFs are editable, but is that even a consideration? (see #2)
2. "Forms" for the most part are "fill in the field" documents, checkboxes, etc. so there is little in the way of "editing" anyway.
3. Re: "multiple forms" - maybe the government should look at streamlining their operations a bit?
4. Reader is FREE to upgrade. Is Word/Office?
5. Reader is truly cross-platform.
6. PDFs can be encrypted with more than a "password"
7. PDFs can have "memos", "notes", "highlights", chain of readers, etc. embedded.

The list goes on and on. So they want someone to make the PDFs for them? I'm a cheap smurf (right Duke? After all we both worked at that smurf newspaper, you know what I can do.) Hire me.

Last edited by iBubba (2006-01-03 9:47 am)

mahakali wrote:

Iirc you need X11 to run OpenOffice in OS X. That might've been the culprit (why it was running slow).

It wasn't so much slow once you got X11 going and then got OpenOffice going, but it had no idea that the OS X Clipboard existed, so you couldn't (for instance) copy a paragraph in OpenOffice and paste it into AppleWorks. You could just save whatever you wanted to transfer to a text file, of course. What finally turned me off the whole thing was that special characters like curly quotes, ellipses, etc., became upside-down question marks or other stupid things when you did that (saved a text file and opened it in System X). But if you wanted to create documents in XWindows and leave them there, that would work fine.

mahakali wrote:

I don't know why you're against Quinn's migrating to open document format. Maybe he does that so the state wouldn't have to pay MS Office licensing fees each year.

Apparently that's the big concern, according to Wikipedia. I really have no idea if the state has to pay Microsoft an annual licensing fee to use their software. I've always been under the impression that if you buy a computer program it's yours and it will just keep working. Maybe large-scale multi-user licenses work differently. Wiki says that Peru, Europe and Massachusetts are worried that if a file is stored in some Microsoft Office format that the file will be unreadable in 20 years, if only for legal or technical reasons. If Microsoft is really putting the screws to the government, then I guess I'd be all for ditching their software and going with OpenOffice.

This whole story is really just another episode in the ongoing battle between Microsoft and the Sun/Netscape/AOL alliance. That's the war that brought us a slew of Web pages that could either be viewed in Internet Explorer or Netscape but not both, because Microsoft decided to invent their own versions of Java and Javascript. Sun sued them over the Java and I'm actually not sure if they won or not. Maybe it's still in the courts?

Now the same thing is happening with XML. Microsoft is being an ass and pushing their own "open" XML file format. To be fair, though, it's kind of smurfed up that Sun has duplicated Microsoft's entire software library and is giving it away for free. I'd be pissed off about that if I was Bill Gates, too. I wish someone would open source the recipe for Budweiser and give it away for free. I doubt if Anheuser-Busch would be as happy about that as I would be, though.

When Netscape became free Microsoft's response was to make Internet Explorer part of the Windows OS on the grounds that a Web browser should be pre-installed when you buy a computer. It'd be nice if they'd decide that about Office, too.

My final answer is to just throw my hands up in the air and call them all smurfs. Microsoft is a bunch of smurfs for obvious reasons. Sun is a bunch of smurfs because the only reason they are giving this software away is so Microsoft will make less money, allowing them to make more. Once OpenOffice is in widespread enough use they will claim that Microsoft has sabotaged Windows so that it will no longer run on that platform and raise the price of Solaris, making more money themselves (or something like that).

XYZ wrote:

This from the man who supported censorship of military families on the grounds that the countries that behead gay people in public would use homosexual bait boys to get strategic information?

I don't think that's exactly how I put it, but we can go with that.

iBubba wrote:

PDF

The whole problem is just not that simple, I guess. The files in question can include anything from a memo to a massive spreadsheet outlining the state's annual budget to the 3D representation of the blueprints for a bridge to nowhere.

That latter example is the most relevant, actually. How come Sun doesn't open source 3D rendering in order to break AutoCAD's monopoly? Because AutoCAD is not the giant that Microsoft is, and because Sun programmers would actually have to do some work in order to do that. (Sun didn't really write OpenOffice, some software company in Germany did and Sun bought it just to give it away and piss Microsoft off.)

Last edited by Duke Stratosphere (2006-01-03 1:32 pm)

Well the other issue is should I as a citizen have to pay a specific company money to access government documents?  ie if they government stores everything in MS Office format, for me to access the info and forms that I've already paid for, I would have to buy office from MS.  Sure most people have done it, but it would be like building a road and then only letting GM cars on it.