WHEN it comes to OOXML shills, it's clear that they want to ruin ODF as much as they want OOXML to succeed. These two tasks are not mutually exclusive.
I still don't understand the intent of removing and/or deprecating support for foreign elements, however, which seems to be a direction that has only come up very recently. There are a growing number of organizations building custom solutions around those sorts of extensibility mechanisms, which allow for the best of both worlds: standards-based formatting markup for use by desktop apps (word processors, etc.), and custom markup for non-visual processing by custom systems.
I won't belabor the reasons I think this is a good approach, but for anyone who's interested, here are a few blog posts with more information on this topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/03/03/microformats-and-open-xml.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/03/26/custom-xml-markup.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/05/19/custom-schemas-revisited.aspx
I think we all agree that introduction of foreign elements can cause interoperability problems, but I'd rather see us fix those problems than give up on custom schema support altogether. The use of class attributes in microformat-tagged HTML and the use of WordprocessingML's customXml element are both examples of approaches that allow rigorous standards-based validation without foregoing the benefits of custom schema support. It would be great if ODF 1.2 could offer similar capabilities, in my opinion.
Comments
Alex Brown
2009-02-16 16:00:22
I'd have thought you would hailed the inclusion of Microsoft in the ODF committees at the OASIS consortium, and declared yourself positively satisfied with this move.
Haven't the contributions of MSFT employees there been both useful and constructive?
- Alex.
Roy Schestowitz
2009-02-16 16:12:52
"We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger….If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger."
--Jim Allchin, Microsoft's Platform Group Vice President
Smile, Alex. It might lull some chaps in the audience. Microsoft calls this strategy "schmoozing".
Needs Sunlight
2009-02-16 16:36:23
It's probably about time to have governments declare MSFT as a problematic political movement.
Pho Developer
2009-02-16 22:50:56
When you go through the whole archive it looks to me like Doug's suggestion would bring ODF to a point where it would be marginally useful to developers in an enterprise environment, rather than just being a tool for those who want to interoperate (or try to interoperate) between simple office suites.
Rob's responses in return make very little sense, he is supposed to be a supporter of ODF, yet he seems to be doing his best to hold back functionality to a point where it suits one or more of the limited applications IBM builds in this area, I suspect he is afraid of the engineering expectations that the Symphony team would face if this type of capability made it into the ODF file format.
One more point that you have missed... adding this type of custom schema support into ODF would kill of one of Microsoft's arguments for why they need OpenXML.
Reading between the lines, as somebody who has watched this debate with an open mind, I see something very positive for ODF in Doug's suggestion.