My friend and colleague Doug Mahugh appears on Microsoft’s presspass site this morning. He is announcing the publication of our implementation notes for ODF 1.1 in Office 2007.
I’m sure he will blog about the details later today. In the mean time the Q&A in the press release makes for interesting reading.
As those who build standards into their own products are well aware, as you turn a specification into code you have to make choices along the way, and in line with the commitments that we made in the Interoperability Principles Doug’s objective is to make the details of those choices transparent.
Doug highlights an example in the Q&A;
Mahugh: Bold text is a good example. The ODF specification supports a wider variety of “font weight” or boldness than other formats that Word supports. Therefore we sometimes adjust the font weight in a document to match the specific values that Word supports. The implementation note on this topic will help other implementers understand the coding behind that adjustment.
You will find the notes published on the Document Interoperability Initiative site, just follow this link. You might also want to take a look at a post of Doug’s from earlier this year where he outlined our guiding principles for our ODF implementation.
Finally, there is one more point from the Q&A that is worth raising. We believe that what we have done here is a best practice for the industry. In the same way that standards specifications are persistent over time, these notes will also help not only those who want to deliver interoperable document solutions today but also those who are wanting to fully understand the document markup many years from now.
Again, from the Q&A;
PressPass: If the goal is interoperability, it seems like this is something that every vendor should do.
Mahugh: We agree and encourage all implementers of standards to be fully transparent about the solutions they develop. This, along with shared stewardship of evolving standards and open collaboration among vendors, will help achieve the level of interoperability that customers require.
update: Doug’s post is up.