Late Night PC

Tim Bray upset Scoble a couple days back with a brief post questioning Microsoft's decision to go their own way with a proprietary XML format (he calls O12X for short) instead of the more established ODF. Scoble's defense of O12X sounds to me like a "not-invented-here" attitude toward ODF. I know Microsoft has a lot more riding on the decision of when to support ODF. The longer they wait, the more support can build for O12X and the more they can benefit from the incompatibility. If O12X outlasts ODF, then life is easy. If ODF sticks around and takes any noticeable market share, they'll just release an exporter that they've probably already built and tried out (either officially or just some coder's side-project). There's nothing really surprising or new here to me. The argument that O12X to ODF conversion (via Save-As) would lose some features doesn't hold water as long as Word can still Save As plain text. Or RTF. Or HTML. I've seen differences when saving from Word to pretty much any other format. The big bonuse here is that with an XML format, you can include stuff from multiple namespaces. That means that you can get the Word forms with XForms. You can get the Word Art (do they still call it that?) with SVG. You can get bookmarks with XPointer. I don't know the nitty-gritty details of the two formats, but I'm willing to bet that you could round out whatever else is missing by including the other features from another namespace that Microsoft makes up. That is to say, feature xyz isn't accurately reflected in other standard formats, so we'll make up a namespace xyz and use it just for those bits. XML handles this. Instead Microsoft is going the way of putting it all into their own namespace. Anyways, in the comments I suggested someone write an exporter as a plug-in, add-in or set of macros for Office. Stéphane Rodriguez points out there's a big difference between Save As and add-ins. Stéphane , you're definitely right that average people won't use something that's separate from the main application. I'm just looking at the way people who have a pressing business need to deal with O12X and ODF can handle things in the near term. This leads me to wonder a little further though. If it's separate anyhow, what if some interested party came up with a little XSLT to transform O12X into ODF? Then they could decide which features they need. This is something that Microsoft could do, even in the short term. It's not much work compared to the other formats they support. In reality, we'll probably see someone from the outside do it first, and for a long time it won't be good enough for general use.