2008 Mar 25 - Tue
How Not To Form a Standard
Rob Weir has a blog called An Antic Disposition where he discusses
The Disharmony of OOXML.
The eloquent center piece of his article is a table representing how various applications represent a smiple
text string with one word in red, represented here verbatim:
| Format | Text Color | Text Alignment |
|---|
| OOXML Text | <w:color
w:val="FF0000"/> | <w:jc w:val="right"/> | | OOXML Sheet | <color
rgb="FFFF0000"/> | <alignment horizontal="right"/> | | OOXML Presentation | <a:srgbClr
val="FF0000"/> | <a:pPr algn="r"/> | | ODF Text | <style:text-properties
fo:color="#FF0000"/> | <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end" /> | | ODF
Sheet | <style:text-properties fo:color="#FF0000"/> | <style:paragraph-properties
fo:text-align="end"/> | | ODF Presentation | <style:text-properties
fo:color="#FF0000"/> | <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end"/> |
Some wag once mentioned that a standard is nice, you have so many from which to choose. The standards
writers for OOXML must have had this in mind when they allowed the diversity of Text Coloration and Alignment into
the standard. Oh, wait. The applications were written first, then some general bucket was designed to hold
the output these applications produced.
As the writer says, it would have been nice to create a 'single standard' and then retrofit the application's output
to conform to the file format. If an application needs to store it differently internally, so be it, but conform
to some level of operability in the file format. Hmmm, can each application read each other's handiwork? If not, what
good is a standard?
The article indicates that once ODF was established, Open Office changed to match the standard. And from the table
above, we can see all the tools within Open Office conform, with the result of twin goals of true universality of information interchange
and simplicity of software design have been reached.
That would be a high standard for OOXML to achieve.
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