Oliver Bell’s Weblog

I have been on the road for the last week and have not had quite as much time as I would have liked to keep up with the blog, or with anybody else’s for that matter…

Reading through the huge backlog of random stuff this morning there were a few posts that caught my eye;

The first was some prose that Rob Weir (IBM’s chief of being a nice enough chap when you actually meet him) posted last night. He talked about the topic of harmonization, which has been a conversation in at least one national body here in Asia Pacific.

From Rob’s post;

Depending on who you ask, document standard harmonization is either impossible or inevitable, anathema or nirvana. Let’s dig a little into this question and see if the two sides are really that far apart.

Rob goes on to give an explanation of what he feels needs to be done, but appears to jump into the process somewhere in the middle.

Brian Jones then added a little structure to the conversation in a post of his own;

There have been some discussions over the past several years about the harmonization of Open XML with ODF. In reality the world of formats is clearly much broader than just ODF and Open XML, but given the political climate the focus lately has been specifically on those two formats. As most folks know, the first step towards harmonization is to really gain a true understanding of the differences between the two formats. Last year the German national standard body DIN stood up and took a key driving role in this discussion. A number of different groups, including PC-Ware Information Technologies AG, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH, OPENLiMiT Holding AG, Dialogika GmbH, Ecma TC45, and Novell and independent experts have been working with DIN to truly understand what the differences between the formats are.

Brian goes on to talk about the work that DIN have been doing for around a year now to map the differences between ODF and OpenXML with the goal of documenting a complete and well researched set of information that helps us all understand where the two formats diverge and complement each other.

There is a lot of interest in the harmonization topic, but at this point, it’s not clear what the suggestion actually entails as Rob Weir himself acknowledged. Some people (including Rob) have suggested there is 90% overlap between the two standards and that harmonization should be pretty simple additive process where features of one spec are added to the other spec. I don’t personally believe this; I’ve posted before about some pretty big differences in approach (in formulas and spreadsheets performance for example). Rationalizing these is not up to me or Rob Weir (or any specific company). The formats are not sub-sets and super-sets of each other, they are fundamentally different. Any effort for harmonization must begin with some deep thinking about how things like text, tables, styles, graphics and page layout models are different (finding the difference is at the core of the DIN work) and how they can be rationalized when their core design is very different.

The press release that DIN put out when this working group was originally formed shares more information;

“Today there’s no longer any reason why we should have to make a straight choice between the two standards,” says Gerd Schürman, head of the eGovernment unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS discussing the aims of the Group. “This is the precise point of departure for the ‘Translation of Document Formats’ Working Group which aims to describe how interoperability between the two formats can be achieved. We know from the scenarios of the Fraunhofer FOKUS eGovernment Lab just how important it is to allow for the coexistence of a variety of open standards – and we can prove that seamless workflows involving a range of different technologies, products and standards are truly possible in the real world.”

Finally, in a related but unrelated entry on his site, Gray Knowlton has a brilliant round up that shows the progress and commitments that have been made over the last several years to open up the formats that all of the Microsoft Office products use to store data. I’m one of those long term Microsoft guys, fifteen years ago when I joined there is no way I would have predicted that we would be where we are today.

If you carry an interest in this topic, and it was probably that interest that brought you to this site, then I would encourage you to go and take a look.

I’m really tempted to just copy Gray’s entire text, but I’ll resist.

From Gray’s Post;

Microsoft has been and continues to be fully committed to opening its document formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Interoperability is not new to Office, and Open XML is part of a much broader strategy around interoperability for Office. When we look at the past three years of document format related investments, you’ll see this shining through; we’ve done quite a lot. Different circumstances led to each of these activities, but as a collection of work, the intent is unmistakable, and despite claims to the contrary, we’re highly motivated to ensure that we can participate in an open environment. These are all steps toward openness, which is good for us, good for our customers and good for the industry.

Happy reading!