Eric S. Raymond writes on his blog: "There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too. OSI's official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI's position. But I find that my resolve is being sorely tested."
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Member since:2005-07-06
You mean, expand ODF rather than make OOXML? OOXML was in development concurrently with ODF.
No it wasn't. As I'd explained in an earlier comment you'd ignored, you can't simply link to a MSDN blog that has a timeline on it that has extrapolated out Microsoft's closed formats until 1998 in an effort to try and make the whole thing look like a whole grand-plan process for OOXML.
ODF was in existence and being worked on around 2001/2002, before OOXML was even a glint in the ECMA's eye.
And all I was pointing out was that Denmark and the other national bodies didn't object to standardizing a format that purports to support spreadsheets yet can't even support formulas.
And yet, all the spreasheets implementing ODF do have formulas implemented. There was just no formal spec for it, which we now have. How much more proof do you need that the process with which ODF has been has been developed, and is being developed, actually works sweetheart?
We've had this ODF formulas stuff wheeled out on every MSDN blog in existence, and it's crap because it doesn't match up to real world implementations of ODF.
What would be more sensible is to not "rush" ODF 1.0 through ISO with such a huge deficiency in functionality soley for the political purposes of being able to proclaim "We're first!!"
This is another nugget wheeled out regularly on MSDN blogs. Apparently, a format cannot be submitted to the ISO and then iteratively improved (which is actually happening, hence version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 etc). You ain't seen very many ISO standards, eh?
It's all a massive conspiracy to get ODF to be first ahead of OOXML, which wasn't even in existence for very long before ODF's ISO approval. I don't know why this seems to bother you, but it does.
And no, I don't deny Weir's criticism that OOXML spredsheet formulas aren't spec'ed explicitly enough. So what?
Because there has been no attempt to create a process to improve it, as with ODF?
Molly's arguments at this point seem to take an altogether different tac, for reasons that should be obvious ;-). I'll deal with them in my next post.
Edited 2007-09-04 12:25
Member since:
2006-07-04
"was it really more efficient to design an entirely new file format rather than try to expand the one that existed already? "
You mean, expand ODF rather than make OOXML? OOXML was in development concurrently with ODF.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/07/09/open-xml-timel...
And in fact, both OOXML and ODF are the result of "expanding a format that existed already".