Tech Center Current

Microsoft has begun sending out e-mails urging people to oppose an upcoming California state bill that would promote open interoperability with digital documents. The bill, named “California A.B. 1668 : Open Document Format, Open Source“, would require all state agencies to standardize on XML-based open document standards so that they may be accessible to a wider range of applications and operating systems. The bill also establishes a “procurement preference” for the OpenDocument format (ODF). Microsoft objects to this stated preference and asserts that Microsoft’s own Office Open XML format would be a better candidate.

Here is a basic run-down of both formats:

OpenDocument (formally “OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications”) was created by the OASIS consortium in May 2005 and is considered the “original” multipurpose open XML document format. It is an ISO and IEC International Standard. Current implementations include the open source OpenOffice.org office suite (which aims to be a complete free replacement for Microsoft Office), StarOffice, Google Docs, AbiWord (an open source word processor), and KOffice (an open source office suite for Linux). Microsoft Office doesn’t yet support it by default, but Microsoft has sponsored an open source project called ODF-Converter which attempts to add support through a plugin. ODF-Converter 1.0 has already been released for Microsoft Word. OpenDocument support is also slated for the next versions of Corel’s WordPerfect and Apple’s TextEdit for the Mac.

Office Open XML is a format created by Microsoft in November 2005 and was made specifically to compete with OpenDocument. Basically, it is just designed more to Microsoft’s liking with consideration for how Microsoft Word works internally, but it is incompatible with OpenDocument. It was standardized by ECMA International and is currently implemented in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows as the default format. It will be supported in a future version of OpenOffice.org through contributions from Novell, as well as the next versions of Corel’s WordPerfect and Apple’s TextEdit for the Mac. It is not yet supported in any Mac version of Microsoft Office, although support is planned for later this year.

In general, almost every product that has plans to support Office Open XML also plans to support OpenDocument, although the reverse is not true. Despite Microsoft’s claims in the e-mails, OpenDocument definitely has a lot more support than Office Open XML right now outside of Microsoft. Here are links to frequently updated lists of applications which support each document format:

• List of OpenDocument-supporting applications
• List of Office Open XML-supporting applications

It should be noted that although these formats are, at their core, XML formats, they are usually stored in a ZIP structure in order to package the text with any images and other relevant files, and to compress it to a smaller filesize. So to a computer program, these documents look like ZIP files which contain at least one XML file. What this means is that you can’t simply use an XML parser directly on one of these open document files; you have to pull it out of the ZIP first. Unlike Office Open XML, OpenDocument files may exist as a simple XML file, but it’s somewhat rare to find them like this in the wild. That said, ZIP is a pretty well-established standard and it usually isn’t too difficult to get the XML out of these formats. The fact that these documents are wrapped in a ZIP structure isn’t seen to conflict with the proposed bill.

There have been concerns over whether or not Office Open XML is truly an open format. Sun Microsystems and Microsoft (who hold intellectual property rights on OpenDocument and Office Open XML, respectively) have both made covenants not to enforce any relevant patent violations by implementors of their respective formats, but some legal experts believe that Microsoft’s wording doesn’t truly provide any protection from violations of Microsoft’s patents.

Furthermore, Office Open XML has often been referred to as a “Microsoft Office memory dump”, which implies that its design is very specific to how Microsoft Office works internally and isn’t as easily portable to other applications. For example, there are some formatting elements with no open explanation of their function beyond “auto-space like Word 95″ or “line-wrap like Word 6″. These clearly present a problem when other applications want to implement the format without knowing exactly what special algorithm Word 6 used to wrap lines.

My own personal opinion, like that of the proposed California bill, is that OpenDocument is clearly the preferred format for open interoperability among the widest variety of applications. The only problem is Microsoft’s reluctance to natively support it, but in the short time it has been around it has gathered a dominating amount of support elsewhere. The market will probably force Microsoft to support it natively in an upcoming version of Microsoft Office.

Here are some more relevant links:

• OASIS’ OpenDocument site
• Microsoft’s Office Open XML site
• OpenDocument information
• Office Open XML information
• Comparison of OpenDocument and Office Open XML formats
• Comparison of their respective licenses