3 ms·

for the nitty gritty, check out groklaw.net. permalink : http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpage=20051216153153504 http://groklawstatic.ib

for the nitty gritty, check out groklaw.net. permalink : http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpage=20051216153153504 http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...

tzs 3y ago
I remember reading most of those back at the time they were written. The main one I recall for claims of not being open was that the drafts at the time had markup for marking things such as "use Word 6 line spacing" and "use WordPerfect 7 paragraph wrapping" or similar. The claim was that since those formats and behaviors were not openly documented having elements for them made OOXML not open. That was a questionable claim for a couple reasons. First, that markup was not there for use in newly made documents, and new word processors (including those from Microsoft) were not expected to implement it--they were expected to ignore it. What it was there for as archiving. For example at the time WordPerfect was pretty much the de facto standard for legal documents. Many legal publishers and large law forms stored all their documents as WordPerfect files, and had tools to manipulate those documents outside of WordPerfect. Those tools were based on reverse engineering of the WordPerfect formats. These places had large archives of WordPerfect documents. Suppose they wanted to move to a more current, better documented archive format such as ODF or OOXML. It would be possible to write a converter that would turn a WordPerfect document into an ODF or OOXML document and change their internal document tools to understand ODF and OOXML, but since Star Office's and Microsoft Office's formatting options were not a superset of WordPerfect's that conversion would be lossy. The straightforward way to deal with that is to find some way to add some extra data when you do that conversion to record what WordPerfect formatting options that you could not map to ODF/OOXML were in effect at a given point in the document. Make your tools understand the extra data your converter adds and then your tools can reproduce accurate copies of the originals when needed. There were multiple parties that would be doing that. It would be silly for them to each come up with their own way to add that extra data. Some might make it custom tags. Some might make custom attributes. Some might do it with comments. Or CDATA. It would be much nicer if all the people who were extended ODF or OOXML to archive WordPerfect documents used the same way to add that extra information. That would make it easier if they ever wanted to exchange archived WordPerfect documents. And that's what things like use "WordPerfect 7 paragraph wrapping" were: Microsoft saying "You all who have reverse engineered WordPerfect and want to mark in your document archives that some document uses some WordPerfect specific formatting, mark it this way". They did this for a bunch of older word processor and spreadsheet formats. Second, I believe they took this out of a later draft.

tzs 3y ago

I remember reading most of those back at the time they were written. The main one I recall for claims of not being open was that the drafts at the time had markup for marking things such as "use Word 6 line spacing" and "use WordPerfect 7 paragraph wrapping" or similar. The claim was that since those formats and behaviors were not openly documented having elements for them made OOXML not open. That was a questionable claim for a couple reasons. First, that markup was not there for use in newly made documents, and new word processors (including those from Microsoft) were not expected to implement it--they were expected to ignore it. What it was there for as archiving. For example at the time WordPerfect was pretty much the de facto standard for legal documents. Many legal publishers and large law forms stored all their documents as WordPerfect files, and had tools to manipulate those documents outside of WordPerfect. Those tools were based on reverse engineering of the WordPerfect formats. These places had large archives of WordPerfect documents. Suppose they wanted to move to a more current, better documented archive format such as ODF or OOXML. It would be possible to write a converter that would turn a WordPerfect document into an ODF or OOXML document and change their internal document tools to understand ODF and OOXML, but since Star Office's and Microsoft Office's formatting options were not a superset of WordPerfect's that conversion would be lossy. The straightforward way to deal with that is to find some way to add some extra data when you do that conversion to record what WordPerfect formatting options that you could not map to ODF/OOXML were in effect at a given point in the document. Make your tools understand the extra data your converter adds and then your tools can reproduce accurate copies of the originals when needed. There were multiple parties that would be doing that. It would be silly for them to each come up with their own way to add that extra data. Some might make it custom tags. Some might make custom attributes. Some might do it with comments. Or CDATA. It would be much nicer if all the people who were extended ODF or OOXML to archive WordPerfect documents used the same way to add that extra information. That would make it easier if they ever wanted to exchange archived WordPerfect documents. And that's what things like use "WordPerfect 7 paragraph wrapping" were: Microsoft saying "You all who have reverse engineered WordPerfect and want to mark in your document archives that some document uses some WordPerfect specific formatting, mark it this way". They did this for a bunch of older word processor and spreadsheet formats. Second, I believe they took this out of a later draft.