Microsoft Open-Sources Its OOXML SDK

[TheBlackCat]

Certainly, the major DEs weren't exactly doing their part to port anything over to Wayland, even after the publicity ramped up; not for a little while, at least. At least, that's the way I saw it.

The major DEs were waiting for Wayland to have a stable API. Once the API was stable, Wayland porting sped up immediately. Again, this had absolutely nothing to do with Mir, and everything to do with waiting for a stable API before putting much work in. And in fact beforehand DEs had explicitly stated they didn't want to waste time on Wayland when the API was still changing. This was the plan for a long time before Mir was announced.

The reason it seems that Mir had something to do with it is just timing: Mir was announced shortly before Wayland API stability was declared.

[afeder]

Yes it's the case, I actually implemented the core part of .ods (ODF spreadsheets) in Qt5 as a library for Qt users to be able to read/write .ods files, and the documentation for ODF is about 1200 pages, otoh OOXML (I looked it up out of curiosity) is out of 4 parts and the 1st one is the biggest one and is 5000+ pages.

I wasn't questioning what the number of pages in the spec is, but rather the claim that one would be out of their mind to implement support for a document format with near universal usage among office users.

[erendorn]

That's the first time I've heard much of that, actually.

I knew it required a lot of infrastructure change, I just figured many people were being lazy about it until a "competitor" showed up (Mir, though I've known for a LONG time that the two's development were not related in any way). Certainly, the major DEs weren't exactly doing their part to port anything over to Wayland, even after the publicity ramped up; not for a little while, at least. At least, that's the way I saw it.

Yes, the reason Mir announcement and the apparent Wayland development speed-up appeared at the same time is because lots of kernel and mesa developments bore their fruits at around that time.
But because kernel/mesa/X11 development is mostly invisible to the general user (and not in the scope of distro development), people did not see this common cause, and assumed that the causality link was between Mir appearance and Wayland development speed-up, when there actually was none (only correlation).

[randomizer]

I wasn't questioning what the number of pages in the spec is, but rather the claim that one would be out of their mind to implement support for a document format with near universal usage among office users.

Microsoft must have thought it crazy to support OOXML as well. After all, it took them until Office 2013 before even they could create documents conforming to the ISO/IEC 29500 Strict standard.

[plonoma]

Everybody please don't believe Microsoft.

Microsoft's file formats are their lockin for Microsoft Office.
It binds you to their products due to network effects. It's a business strategy to capture the market.

Due to competition Microsoft gives support for OOXML including the open source OOXML SDK.
The OOXML file formats got created to compete with ODF and impress the European Comission.
It was meant to be a half assed job and give the appearance of open file formats.
The files outputted from Microsoft Office 2007 - 2010 and other versions have their own variations and resemble some soft of XML based file format. The output file format of Microsoft Office is somewhat alike the OOXML ISO spec but not identical or compatible.

Now that LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice ODF file formats are gaining in popularity Microsoft has to take more measures to lure developers away. Hence the SDK and other goodies.
If you want to know how the complete evolution of their strategy looks like. Take a look at Internet Explorer development.
Large period of stagnation where Microsoft tries to hold back the development of the web.
After other browsers start gaining market share Microsoft suddenly implements tons of interesting features and tries to win the users back.

Please don't fall for these tricks. Use ODF where you can and encourage other developers to improve and support ODF. Including ODF SDK's/toolkits/libraries.

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/odftoolkit.html

[hourwatch]

I have put a request in bugzilla asking to install by default WebODF (an extension that uses HTML5 to display ODF files directly in Firefox) in the firefox windows version.

The best would be to make firefox the default browser of the .odt if there isn't any program already associated to that extension. This way, when someone sends for example an .odt archive to someone who only has installed Office 2007, he could open and see the document without any problem.

When I try to send to my partners an ODF document make in my Libreoffice I always have someone who tells me that his Office it isn't able to open it, and I have to send it again in .doc format. This way, we could help this to no happen so often, and would help to spread an open format like is ODF.

What do you think about the idea?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1030808

[jagoly]

Good, but what about if they expect to be able to edit them? That may confuse them even further.

[climatepete]

OT: Malwarebytes is suspicious of this site

this is probably a false alarm but when I logged in just now Malwarebytes popped up saying
Malicious website blocked: 77.222.142.204 if I wrote it down correctly.

[hourwatch]

Good, but what about if they expect to be able to edit them? That may confuse them even further.

The firefox addon only allows to view the document at the moment, but webodf is working in an online editor too:

http://www.webodf.org/demo/ci/webodf-0.4.2-2009-gb122af0/editor/localeditor.html

However, I thin that always is better to been able to only watch the document in a computer that can't do it that, rather than nothing.