Re: [MLUG] Open Document Format in Minnesota?

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 1/22/07, Jerry Gamblin <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> The Massachusetts case is interesting. OOS "people" spent a ton of
> money to get the open document format passed in the state and signed
> into law. It was thought (on the internet anyway) this would be the
> start of widespread adoption of OpenOffice (etc) until Microsoft
> released there own ODF and sold Massachusetts one of the largest
> Office 2007 licenses to date.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_Open_XML

Very interesting. The wikipedia article seems to point out that the
overall architecture of the XML format they chose is at least slightly
innovative and reasonably well thought out. The only real lamenesses I
see are the requirements for backwards compatibility with old (and
broken) MS stuff. In practice, however, I don't suspect this will pose
much of a problem, especially once MS themselves stops supporting some
of the older and cruftier formats.

(Oh yeah: what's interesting or innovative about the format? It turns
out to be smaller than binary .doc for Word files, and the method to
express links to other entities is, I think, pretty creative and
likely to catch on more generally.)

jking

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