Protect our heritage

August 28, 2007 10:46 pm gman General

As much as I’m loving seeing Microsoft having to re-assess their business, documents like these are a little disappointing. This document was produced in quick time for a full page advert in the Dominion Post (a newspaper in Wellington, which conveniently happens to be the location for the NZ government) after a 2 day meeting with Standards NZ. NZOSS rallied around to get a couple of great people attending to keep things on an even keel and take notes. Good work guys! I am biased on this one, obviously.

4 Responses

  1. Chris I Says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 1:55 am

    “Open XML is a new format that allows Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint
    documents to be easily converted to an open standard”

    At least they are not pretending Open XML is itself a standard..

  2. erik Says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 2:29 am

    I just had to lol (smile quietly to myself?) at that “human readability of XML”.

    One of my friends was recently sent one Excel sheet that was saved using the new XML format. I could not find any application to open it. (I own legal Vista and Office 2007, but I was too lazy to install them under VMWare.) So, I thought “Gee, it’s XML and human readable. All I have to do is to uncompress it and read it.”. Sounded pretty reasonable as all I had to actually extract was one line of text for solving the real life problem.

    Okay, uncompressing went fine.. Found the file with the actual contents very fast. Opened it on Gedit.. WTF. It made my eyes bleed instantly. It was extremely hard to understand (I talk XML as my second language thank you) and I gave up after a while. I gave up extracting one line (roughly 10 words of text) from that.

    After a while the solution was to email the original file using Google Mail to an other account. Google Mail has got this “view as HTML” feature. Guess what? It worked perfectly.

    XML vs me: 1-0
    Google vs all the open source available: 1-0
    Microsoft’s XML format vs ODF: ?

    It might be better.. Or then again not. The tasks we are accomplishing using XML are quite complex, I wouldn’t call it really human understandable even in the best case. Perhaps ODF is a little bit better… But not really readable either.

  3. Matthew Cruickshank Says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 11:58 am

    Hi Glynn, (by the way, I saw your OpenSolaris/Indiana talk at UP here in Wellington a while ago — it was good)

    Thankfully the Microsoft letter has been demoted from yesterdays page C3 to todays page C10, so here’s hoping that it continues on its path to obscurity. I started laughing as I read it… I think it was the idea of hearing Stephen Colbert reading it aloud, lambasting those didn’t stand for businesses, communities and families/puppies.

    I make this OSS document conversion software and I was at the Standards NZ meeting with NZOSS (yeah those were my notes on the NZOSS site that you saw). I think the meeting went well, and I was very impressed with NZ Government Agencies who had a consensus building process and firmly stuck with an opinion of No (due to the technical quality of the spec). Google and IBM did well too — although they were mostly using notes rather going into detail.

    Anyway, there’s some comments here from Don Christie about the main notion in the letter that OOXML has anything to do with retaining legacy documents, http://nzoss.org.nz/node/185

    Cheers!

  4. Matthew Cruickshank Says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    It was inevitable 🙂

    http://holloway.co.nz/sincerity-generator/