Re: [libreoffice-users] Defending ODF against OOXML in the UK

On Sun, 23 Feb 2014 01:12:25 +0100, Alexander Wilms wrote

> If you think that truly open standards are a better solution than 
> OOXML, then it'd be beneficial if you registered on the 
> standards.data.gov.uk page and commented. In 3 days, comments will 
> be closed.

Maybe i'm not going to make friends, but OOXML "strict" actually *is* an open
standard. The real problem is, that MS-Office until 2013 was not capable of
creating "strict" files, but wrote OOXML "transitional" instead (which may -
and as a matter of fact always did - contain proprietary stuff). 
So almost all OOXML files out in the wild today are in fact not 'real' OOXML
but just proprietary, legacy office formats encoded in an XML-structure.

However, OOXML - without distinguishing between the two flavors - was
advertised by MS as being 'open' and you shall blame them for this. Of course
it was a marketing-move to ship Office for years with incomplete, de-facto
proprietary export filter, while claiming to be open... But nevertheless OOXML
in it's 'pure' form is an ISO certified open standard (and not even a bad one
as far as i can tell), and for the sake of open formats: if we can't get rid
of MS Office then we should at least promote the usage of OOXML "strict"
whenever possible.


I still believe that ODF is the better choice though, because of its longer
history as open standard, and i would of course appreciate it if MS would
include proper import and export filters (they already had very good support
in Office 2010, sadly they did not include it in Office 2012 for Mac - the
reasons for this being highly speculative IMHO).


cu
  Stephan

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