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I encourage everybody to read this article.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html

Miguel de Icaza has actually spent much time in development of office like applications like Gnumeric, well at least more than any of us, and seems to be a pretty level guy and calls it how he sees it.

I know the pundits are going to bring up that he works for Novell and Novell has a deal with Microsoft, but take a look at some of the articles on Vista and you will find he is no fan of Microsoft. But he also isn't an OS Kool-Aid drinker.

Read it, it is very educational on the lackings of ODF, http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html

I encourage everybody to read this article.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html

I'm not impressed by Miguel's reasoning in that article. He just seems to have lost it a bit more than he already has in view of the Novell/Microsoft deal and the whole .Net replication thing. There are better responses elsewhere, but some highlights:

Some folks have been using a Wiki to keep track of the issues with OOXML. The motivation for tracking these issues seems to be politically inclined, but it manages to pack some important technical issues.

Hmmmm. A community of people get together to point out shortcomings in a proposed specification - and it's somehow politically inclined? As opposed to what, exactly?

By comparison, ODF only references three ISO standards: Relax NG (OOXML also references this one), 639 (language codes) and 3166 (country codes).

So what about all the W3C standards, with a lot of implementations out in the wild, that ODF uses as well as IETF?

It is weak because the complaint is that Windows Metafiles are not specified. It is certainly not in the standard, but the information is publicly available and is hardly "undisclosed information".

Goodness Miguel....... WMF is actually a shadow, if you like, of graphical function calls made by Windows as it renders. It is absolutely specific to the Windows API and maps right on to it. Hell, even Wine suffers from the WMF flaw it's so specific.

Not only it is demanded that OOXML abide by more standards than ISO's own ODF does, but also that the format used for metafiles from 1999 be used.

I also don't understand this, because WMF is ancient, and was cobbled together in the late 80s for Windows 3.0. CGM dates from 1999, so it is somehow bad? Don't get that one.

There is a good case to be made for OOXML to be further fine-tuned before it becomes an ISO standard. But considering that Office 2007 has shipped, I doubt that any significant changes to the file format would be implemented in the short or medium term.

So Office 2007 has shipped, and that's the barometer by which a proposed ISO standard is approved? There is somehow one law for Microsoft and one law for everyone else and we simply have to lump it? I simply don't get that one. Suppose Office 2007, or a later version of Office, differs from what is in the OOXML spec? What the hell does everyone else do then?

The really bizarre thing he then proceeds to do is praise .Net and XAML at the end and call them achievable goals. I can understand that to be honest, because he needs a reason for Mono to exist, but I still find it........bizarre in view of his silly criticisms elsewhere.

There's something even more bizarre at the end though:

Christian Stefan wrote me to point out that the OOXML specification published by ECMA uses 1.5 line spacing, while OASIS uses single spacing.

He then proceeds to do some adding up of the number of pages in the ODF specification, and all the standards and specs ODF uses, and then uses that to apparently defend why the OOXML spec document is 6000 pages long!

Edited 2007-03-07 00:22