Microsoft has hit back at critics, including IBM, which voted against approving the company's Office OpenXML format as an Ecma standard, claiming it is nothing more than a vendor-dictated specification that documents proprietary products via XML. Ecma International announced the approval of the new standard Dec. 6 following a meeting of its general assembly and said it will begin the fast track process for adoption of the Office OpenXML formats as an ISO international standard in January 2007.
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Member since:2005-07-06
For formats there's a (complete) specification / documentation which can be downloaded and viewed. Standard formats are handeled this way so developers can see if it fit's their (and their potential customers') needs.
Such is readily and freely available for OOXML. Why do you continue to ignore it?
You mentioned "Corel, Novell, Apple, and Microsoft [...] making apps that support OpenXML on Windows, Linux, and Mac" and I asked what about OpenXML outside this setting. The answer surely is "no support"; I mentioned Solaris, NetBSD and IRIX to state where OpenXML won't play a role under these circumstances.
Well, that wasn't me, but OpenOffice.org does support OOXML (with Novell's latest patches; they'll be part of the mainstream OOo soon as well). OOo runs on Solaris and NetBSD.
Member since:
2006-10-08
"OpenXML is a format, not a program. There's no "source code"."
Sorry, you didn't understand the target of my reply reference. I didn't mean the format, I meant the programs that support OpenXML on operating systems different from "Windows". It was a rhethorical question to illustrate the bindings to MICROS~1 and some few software vendors if you want to use OpenXML. If OpenXML is not available for common OSes that are no PC or Mac OSes, I think it won't get much acceptance.
For formats there's a (complete) specification / documentation which can be downloaded and viewed. Standard formats are handeled this way so developers can see if it fit's their (and their potential customers') needs.
You mentioned "Corel, Novell, Apple, and Microsoft [...] making apps that support OpenXML on Windows, Linux, and Mac" and I asked what about OpenXML outside this setting. The answer surely is "no support"; I mentioned Solaris, NetBSD and IRIX to state where OpenXML won't play a role under these circumstances.
Time will tell if OpenXML gets widely used or if it just will replace the binary memory garbage .DOC format(s).