Useful Open XML Information for January 30th

  • Article

Every day I run across a great deal of useful data for Open XML, so I thought I'd share some of that:

David Overton recaps the KB articles that describe how to get Open XML documents indexed using various Microsoft server platforms:

Jasper Hedegaard Bojsen discusses (refutes) the idea that Open XML ISO ratification will harm interoperability:

The DAISY Consortium and Reed Shaffner discuss the current state of the DAISY Translator for Open XML

Oh? What is this? Jim King from Adobe Systems discusses the importance of preserving legacy content for the standardization process for PDF 1.7. (This sounds vaguely familiar, I think I may have heard the Open XML advocates say this on occasion J…). To quote Jim (with typos, sorry Jim):

"In fact, PDF has been a de facto standard based upon three things: the billions of existing files, the thousand of software offerings that create and process those files, and the Adobe PDF 1.7 Reference. And we decided that the order of preference to resolve any differences was in that order, files, software and then documentation. That is definitely not the standards approach where the document is supreme. So as we examined the Adobe PDF 1.7 Reference and turned it into the ISO 32000 draft we adopted what we called this "three legged stool" approach base upon prioritizing the three contributors to the existing standard. If we could capture the most correct interpretation in each area according to those criteria we could produce an ISO document that was (more) supreme and could be acceptable as the definitive word for what a PDF file contains. Of course, the Adode PDF 1.7 Reference proved to be fine for 99.9% of the definition."

I'm surprised that there aren't bloggers lining up all over the place to disagree with this approach, given its similarity to many discussions about Open XML. PDF 1.7, after all is a new spec for Acrobat 8, and was not used / did not exist in the world before 2007. And while PDF 1.7 is a likely a proper super-set of prior PDF versions, it is a brand new format offered for standardization (and ratified by ISO in about a year, through the fast-track process). We are in alignment with Jim on this one… we believe very strongly that preserving legacy content is critical in the document format standardization process.

Baker and McKenzie have published a new white paper discussing Open XML intellectual property issues:

Brian Jones offered some new information about OASIS considering joining DIN to help on ODF and Open XML Interoperability: