Open standards are worth living for, they are so important these days, we (mostly developers) can’t imagine a life without them. But why is there still some rumbling in the sky?
When you take a look in web developing world, you’ll notice we have many standards, and every developer follows them (almost) strictly. And although interpretation of these standard by web browsers isn’t always about roses and moonlight, those standards make our life a bit more easy.
I’m not going to discuss the difference in interpretation of the web standard by the different web browsers, no it’s something else what is rumbling in the sky.
In office-suit land, we have mainly 2 big/great/wonderful office suits: Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.Org. The last one has mainly developed, the in 2006 recogniced ISO standard, ODF of OpenDocument format, based on XML (see W3C). ODF was meant to be the opposite of Microsoft’s formats (doc, xls, ptt, …), but since MS Office 2007, Microsoft introduced a new open format called: Office Open XML (OOXML), which is also based on XML. But we are still only at the gates of hell. Microsoft wanted OOXML to be a ISO standard, which it is now a day.
I can see why Microsoft wanted OOXML to be a open standard, but wouldn’t it be better to use ODF in stead of standardizing OOXML or even develop OOXML. The existence of more than one office suit is good for us as a consumer, prices will drop, functionality added and improvements will be made. But the existence of more than one standard which almost has the same functionality, almost can be seen as twins, isn’t good for us.
In web developer land, we have 1 standard to display information (HTML), 1 standard to store information (XML), 1 standard to design information (CSS), and so on. How difficult can it be to develope and use just 1 standard?
Strange enough, I recommend none of the office suit standard, neither ODF nor OOXML. Just use the old ‘closed’ standard of Microsoft (doc, xls, ptt, …), cause both, MS Office as OpenOffice.Org can read and write to these formats.
So do we need those new standards? No we need the old one to be open, a open standard to live for.
Pakku
June 8th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
i completely agree with you, open standards are the way to go… there has been a debate going on about the technical issues of OOXML lately… wonder why microsoft is pushing for OOXML.. to control the open standards!?
June 8th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Well I think by pushing OOXML as a open standard, they can control several things like easily adding/modifiing stuff/specifications.
Controlling open standard can give you a lot of value