[libreoffice-users] Re: Defending ODF against OOXML in the UK

Hi :slight_smile:
Please can anyone with anything to say about ODF please post comments
to the consultation exercise
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20140220165521599
I think you can post even if you are not English or have trouble
writing in English. Go for it!

My view is that ODF is the only format that really has true
interoperability at the moment. In the future i suspect it will
become MUCH more widely prevalent and files stored in almost any other
format might struggle to be opened.

People might be using DocX quite a bit at the moment but each version
of MS Office seems to give fairly different results when trying to
display files written with other versions of MS Office. The various
different implementations of MS's OOXML have been given different
names. 2007 and 2010 were using a "transistional OOXML" (ie NOT pure
as per the ISO standard and not the same as each other). 2013 and 365
supposedly use "strict" but in the future they might well change again
with no documentation describing the changes (unlike the well
documented changes between ODF 1.2 and "extended". Also it's unlikely
that programs can easily switch between "strict" and whichever is used
as default (unlike OO and LO)

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
I have just registered and made a few comments. They don't appear
immediately and i have no idea about how long the lag is and no idea
if comments posted this late would even be accepted.

There is a LOT of FUD in posts by MS fanboys or just people who have
no idea what they are talking about. Addressing the concerns of some
of the latter might help, or it might be "a bit whiny".

MS posted a hugely, intractably long comment which was summarised and
handled quite neatly by a couple of people but still might be worth
dealing with a couple of specific points in their massive load of FUD.

A better link might be this one;
http://standards.data.gov.uk/proposal/sharing-collaborating-government-documents

However since the proposal doesn't mention MS formats and specifically sticks to
ODF 1.01 and 1.2,
html 4.01 and 5,
csv (yuk but unavoidable imo), and
txt
it might be better to just congratulate the Uk Government on their
excellent (mostly) choices and how well informed they appear to be.

Ideally it might be great to address each of the bullet-points made in
the consultation itself focussing on the ones that ODF is perfect for
and pointing out how OOXML (like DocX etc) fails to achieve the stated
objectives. However i don't think there is time. As said at the
beginning i don't know if anything posted now will really make it or
just vanish into the ether.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: