There have been a few good responses to the Burton Report (you must register to download), the document that debates the relative merits of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Ecma 376 Office Open XML (OOXML). While this document is supposedly “unbiased,” a few writers found reason to contradict that stance.
RESPONSES:
Ryan Paul, a reputable writer, was critical of the report in this Ars Technica piece: Analyst group slams ODF, downplays Microsoft ISO abuses
The Slashdot community came out and slammed the report with “Study Touting OOXML Over ODF is Debunked.”
Pravda offered some very good coverage. On the 2nd page of their article is a verbatim dump from the ODF Wikipedia article.
Erwin Tenhumberg (Sun): “Dispelling Myths Around ODF”
ODFalliance.org Replies:
The latest is a detailed page-by-page rebuttal by the ODF Alliance report, just out now. Some highlights from this report include the following:
The Burton Group has recently released a report entitled “What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications” and Guy Creese. This report makes a number of erroneously negative and unbalanced statements about the Open Document Format (ODF), many of them quite puzzling.
1. Page 5 says “…[L]ibraries and large businesses, faced with storing and using years of Microsoft Office legacy documents, will prefer OOXML, as OOXML can more faithfully recreate the look and metadata (such as spreadsheet formulas) stored in Microsoft’s binary file formats.”
This statement confuses file formats and applications. Surely, OOXML cannot faithfully recreate the look of anything. It is a file format, not an application.
Microsoft Office is the application that interprets OOXML, and it can also render legacy binary file formats, except when Microsoft decides to remove support for them, as Microsoft recently did with Office 2003 SP32. There can be further problems when Microsoft decides not to support legacy features, such as when they removed support for Visual Basic scripting in Office 2008 for the Macintosh3.
The authors fail to note that no other application supporting OOXML has been able to faithfully or fully recreate the look of Microsoft’s legacy binary documents. So the statement that OOXML – a file format – is the solution for rendering legacy documents is simply false.
2. Page 5 asserts that OOXML will win because, “…OOXML is an extensible standard. It allows vendors and enterprises to extend the standard within an OOXML-defined framework… This built-in ability to augment the OOXML standard is a safety valve for future innovation, allowing new features to be added without forcing vendors to invent yet another separate file format or wait for standards bodies to give their approval.”
Why does the report argue that OOXML is preferred over ODF for extensibility reasons, but fail to mention that ODF’s extensibility features are just as rich? This lack of balance is disconcerting. ODF has extensibility features that are just as powerful as OOXML’s, and, what is more important, ODF’s features are based on existing industry standards, such as the W3C’s RDF and XForms.Further, it is not clear to us what the statement about not waiting for standards body to give their approval means. Surely the authors are not suggesting that we repeat the problems of some earlier efforts where multiple “user defined extensions” to a standard meant that we really didn’t have a standard at all?
3. Page 13 says, “ODF is currently somewhat simple (and simplistic) compared with alternatives such as OOXML.”
The rather negative term “simplistic” is asserted with no backing argument or evident motivation. In our opinion, this does little to establish a sense of objectivity in the report. We might also ask when did “simple” became bad thing in a standard? XML is simple. HTML is simple.Moreover, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and other essential IETF standards are explicitly named that way because of their simplicity.
Posted by FA Editors at 9:47 PM PST
