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5/19/2009

Some more un-guidance from the ODF Alliance

This was a funny read on ODF interoperability. The ODF Alliance brings us a 'fact sheet' about the support for change tracking in Office SP2, and how that is 'broken'.

The opening paragraph states:

Putting millions of ODF files into circulation that are non-interoperable and incompatible with the ODF support provided by other vendors, however, is a recipe for fragmentation, effectively breaking open standards based interoperability on the desktop.

Take a second to let that sentence sink in a little.

The first part talks about being incompatible, not with the ODF standard, but with deficient ODF implementations provided by other vendors. Lol. That is silly.

The sentence then states that not following deficient implementations of ODF breaks open standards based interoperability.

That's a good spin. You break standards based interoperability by not implementing the unconformant features of other implementations.

Effectively, the ODF alliance states that this:

Is better than this:

Makes total sense to me. Who needs this hub and spokes model when you can eat spaghetti?

Posted at 8:56 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (5)

Comments

Alex Brown

That diagram says it all ... - Alex.

at 5/19/2009 9:49 PM

Rob Weir

Wouter, you are beating up on a straw man. No one is suggesting that you ignore standards. But when given a choice between 1) following the standard and being interoperable and 2) following the standard and not being interoperable, why did your implementation do the 2nd? In other words, you are turning this into an either/or mutually exclusive argument. But you can be both interoperable and conformant. Your ODF Add-in showed that. So why did you backstep withhold interoperability in SP2?

at 5/19/2009 9:51 PM

Gareth

Hi Wouter,

I figured out how this is all going to work.

We just need to replace the Spec bit of your second diagram with the Weirotron and everything will be fine.

Check my blog post for more details:

http://aristippus303.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/on-the-scalability-of-a-standard-time-for-a-weirotron/

Gareth

at 5/23/2009 6:52 PM

Bart Samwel

I think you're reading way too much into this. When you read the remainder of the document, it is clear that they say that MS ODF support isn't standards compliant, and the other vendors' support is. Therefore, when they talk about "incompatible with the ODF support provided by other vendors", they effectively mean "incompatible with standards-compliant ODF implementations". In effect, they say that the hub-and-spokes model is broken by the MS ODF support because they do not support round trips to the hub.

at 5/27/2009 4:24 PM

Doug Mahugh

Bart, I believe that Wouter's point is that the document, including the remainder of it, is rather nonsensical. In particular, its claims about conformance are merely claims, with no test documents or test procedure even alluded to, much less provided for independent verification. Alternative, here is a test anyone can reproduce themselves: http://adjb.net/post/Notes-on-Document-Conformance-and-Portability-4.aspx

at 6/2/2009 3:21 PM

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