Rethinking ODF leadership

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

Jesper Lund Stocholm — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:24:06 GMT

Luc,

"There is clearly a serious contradiction here: Microsoft insists that they use the "only standardised formula syntax", but then it appears that the namespace is not defined in the standard, and Microsoft has to use a proprietary namespace to implement the "standard" syntax."

Excuse me - but you seem to be completely missing crucial technical points here.

Microsoft uses the formula syntax in OOXML - the only standardised formula syntax. The format is perfectly (well, ahem) defined in ISO/IEC 29500. The formulas are part of the specification of SpreadsheetML in Part 1. They are defined in BNF-notation in section 18.7 (Formulas) from page 2268.

About the namespace: it's a pointer to where information about how to interpret it can be found. As Doug wrote somewhere, ODF requires the following for formulas:

"a namespace prefix specifying the syntax and semantics used within the formula."

And this is exactly that Microsoft does - they supply a namespace prefix (msoxl) while explaining in their implementer's notes that this refers to Excel's formula syntax. Excel's formula syntax is defined in ... tadaa ... ISO/IEC 29500.

(I do think that they should elaborate a bit more in their notes - explaining exactly where the syntax and specification of Excel's formulas can be found - I'll log a comment on this in a bit)

"Isn't it an additional proof that OOXML is much more a proprietary Microsoft standard than an open ISO standard ?"

No - it's additional proof that you don't always know what you are talking about.

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

Luc Bollen — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:59:48 GMT

@Jesper: "One thing that might speak against using "ooxml" or "is29500" or similar would be, that the namespace used for spreadsheet formula in SP2 is not defined in OOXML, so it might cause a bit of confusion."

There is clearly a serious contradiction here: Microsoft insists that they use the "only standardised formula syntax", but then it appears that the namespace is not defined in the standard, and Microsoft has to use a proprietary namespace to implement the "standard" syntax.

The impact is that if somebody else (e.g. OpenOffice.org) wants to be interoperable with the ISO OOXML formula syntax, it has to use the Microsoft proprietary namespace ! This is a nonsense.

Isn't it an additional proof that OOXML is much more a proprietary Microsoft standard than an open ISO standard ?

At least, it is a proof that more time was needed to correctly review OOXML before making it an ISO standard. (Another proof of this is that there is no mechanism in OOXML to identify the version, but this is another story)

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

Jesper Lund Stocholm — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:17:50 GMT

hAl,

"If so I cannot see IBM as a serious Office developer but in reality we could all easily see that IBM (and Rob) were already aware of the interoperability with MS Office SP2 for months if not even already last year."

Actually, I am sure they have been aware of how Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 handles formulas in ODF since at least August 2008. I documented the approach by SP2 after the first DII-workshop when I wrote the article "DII ODF workshop - the good stuff". This was August 18th 2008. At that time we were playing with a pre-alpha-release of Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 and two of my conclusions were these:

1. Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 uses their own formulas in ODF spreadsheets

2. Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 strips away formulas from "unknown" namespaces

http://idippedut.dk/post/2008/08/18/DII-ODF-workshop-the-good-stuff.aspx

(the last test file in the article, Testfile_20.ods)

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

hAl — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:06:17 GMT

@Jan wildeboer

[quote]And exactly this is already done for example with CSS and (X)HTML. So why not have a similar validator for ODF? Maintained by OASIS, just as the W3C is doing?[/quote]

Actually the MS Offfice SP2 files seem to validate fine against the OASIS ODF schema's.

A validator would not be of much use on ODF on such issues as it has several crucial parts not validating. Both formula's and MathML 2.0 is not in the schema's.

Formula's in ODF are just arbitrary strings in the XML schema's and MathML even is arbitrary markup in the ODF schema's.

The latter being helpfull to OOo as including MathML 2.0 schema's or use the official schema's as a normative reference would make all OpenOffice files using math fail.

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

hAl — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:29:21 GMT

So rob weir actually refused a beta version of the specification ?

Could he explain what possible real reason he could have for doing that.

The license issue seems moot as millions of people use MS beta products every day without any problem and have done so for ages. and that included a ton of IBM people as well as I have seen very often as well. (I actually recieved an Office SP2 beta copy from an IBM guy).

As ODF TC chairman getting the chance to preview the ODF implementation of the leading Office product suite should be quite normal. And even in a role of IBM office product representative involved in producing new IBM Office prodcuts he and/or his IBM collegues should have been evaluating MS Office SP2 for at least 6 months or so.

There is just no way in hell that Rob Weir only knew of interoperability issues untill the official release of MS Office SP2.

Most likely his comments were timed to a moment that the Symphony 1.3 beta was able to show compatibility with OpenOffice.

It is a total disgrace that Rob Weir apperantly refuses to test a beta product of the leading Office suite he was offered to do so and then critisises this product in a post where he actually compared it with non public IBM 's beta products that he never prior to his post offered to scrutiny or commenting by others.

Can anybody seriously persieve IBM development team fully ignoring devlopment of the leading spreadsheet product in producing their own new product and not testing interoperability themselves using the MS Office SP2 beta ?

If so I cannot see IBM as a serious Office developer but in reality we could all easily see that IBM (and Rob) were already aware of the interoperability with MS Office SP2 for months if not even already last year.

The currently available Symphony 1.2 versions actually mutilates OOo 3.x files in a way that is horrible to any users making the information in cetain formulas unavailable and this makes interoperability a total joke.

Compared to IBM's current Symphony implementation the Microsoft approach which micht not preserve formula's but only values represent a much more valued approach as the reciever will at least have a spreadsheet with reliable data preserved for the user, something that IBM's product is unable to accomplish.

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

Jesper Lund Stocholm — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:47:29 GMT

Luc,

"Isn't it strange that the prefix used by Microsoft to reference this standard is "msoxl"? I would have rather expected that you use something like "ooxml". This would have sound more ISO-29500 than the proprietary prefix "msoxl" like in "MicroSoft Office XmL"..."

I never actually thought about that. One thing that might speak against using "ooxml" or "is29500" or similar would be, that the namespace used for spreadsheet formula in SP2 is not defined in OOXML, so it might cause a bit of confusion.

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

Luc Bollen — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:08:25 GMT

Doug, one thing puzzles me. You wrote that SP2 "uses a namespace prefix (as specified in the spec) to define the syntax and semantics of its formula markup through reference to an approved, published standard."

Isn't it strange that the prefix used by Microsoft to reference this standard is "msoxl"? I would have rather expected that you use something like "ooxml". This would have sound more ISO-29500 than the proprietary prefix "msoxl" like in "MicroSoft Office XmL"...

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

Luc Bollen — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:28:19 GMT

Doug, after reading again your comment, I now see what you meant by "undocumented non-standardized extension to achieve interoperability". Please replace in my comment above the word "lie" by "far fetched explanation". Apologises for an inappropriate word.

I was confused by the fact that, while standards are normally made to improve interoperability, Microsoft manages to use standards as an excuse to break interoperability !

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

Luc Bollen — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:02:08 GMT

Doug, in ODF 1.2 conformant documents, the used formula *prefix* will have to be "of:", and none of the current OOo or SP2 prefix will remain valid.

OOo and Koffice DON'T use a non-standardised *extension*: they simply use an allowed prefix, exactly in the same way as SP2 !

What you explain above as being the Microsoft excuse is simply a lie !

re: Rethinking ODF leadership

marc — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:55:45 GMT

I tried the formula-thing in Gnumeric creating and saving a simple spreadsheet. The result: Gnumeric saves formulas in the interoperable way ( contrary to what the Microsoft product does ):

"oooc:=[.B3]+[.C3]+[.D3]"

~ $ gnumeric --version

gnumeric version '1.8.2'