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China's Open Document Format Fight 118

Posted by Zonk from the open-docs-around-the-world dept.
eldavojohn writes "While there's been a lot of talk of the open document formats in the states, China is facing the same dilemma. A ZDNet blog examines the issue by pointing out they will most likely merge their current standard with either OOXML or ODF. The bulk of their post points out why OOXML shouldn't be ISO certified and is the biggest problem for Microsoft's standard: 'Another Standard, Microsoft does not support, is the specification RFC 3987, which defines UTF-8 capable Internet addresses. Consequently, OOXML does not support, to use Chinese characters within a Web address.' This would be problematic for many languages, not just Chinese."
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China's Open Document Format Fight More

China's Open Document Format Fight

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  • It's hard, to read submissions, when there, are so, many, commas.

    • Re:waytoomanycommas (Score:5, Funny)

      by Eddi3 ( 1046882 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @04:13PM (#20077687) Homepage Journal
      That was, at the very most, a half assed at humor. There are, in fact, ways to add, not only too many commas, but enough to make, say, your head, or mine, explode upon reading the sentence, phrase, etc.

      Not only that, but you can, unbelievably, even use lots of commas, while maintaining mostly, although maybe not entirely, correct punctuation.

      -Eddie
      • Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a expert in grammar or punctuation!

      • That was, at the very most, a half assed at humor. There are, in fact, ways to add, not only too many commas, but enough to make, say, your head, or mine, explode upon reading the sentence, phrase, etc.

        Not only that, but you can, unbelievably, even use lots of commas, while maintaining mostly, although maybe not entirely, correct punctuation./quote>

        For best results, imagine this read in a Shatner voice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsa ( 15680 )
      Yes, and it's very hard to read TFA with a stupid 'Take the survey now' popup plastered over it. I hate those.
  • I'm surprised the character set issue hasn't come up before. Is this one reason Europe is going to ODF? (Granted, many European languages use the Roman character set, but still.) What is Japan doing with this issue?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bmo ( 77928 )
      " Europe is going to ODF?"

      Actually, people are going to ODF now because it's an actual ISO standard.

      OOXML ain't. If OOXML ever gets ISO cert, then the entire ISO is intellectually bankrupt and can't be trusted with even a screw thread standard.

      --
      BMO

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by Macthorpe ( 960048 )
        Silly me. I thought that if OOXML gets an ISO certification it doesn't prove anything other than that they know more about standards than you.

        • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 )
          Silly me. I thought that if OOXML gets an ISO certification it doesn't prove anything other than that they know more about standards than you.

          Yep, silly you. You assume the truth of Y and blandly state "if X then Y". While Y is expected to be true, OOXML requires reproduction of all the bugs that have ever shipped in MS Office so (X xor Y) is invariably true. A true value for X would most likely be attributable to corruption of the standards body by Microsoft, so Y would be false in that case. So your state

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Daengbo ( 523424 )
            Koreans do the same thing with Naver.com ... I don't get it.
          • Except ISO are still a standards body, i.e. a collection of minds, and you're one guy on Slashdot.

            The characterisation of them as 'corrupt and evil' because they have a job to do and they happen to disagree with Slashdot groupthink is the false assumption here, nothing to do with the actual spec at all.
            • Except ISO are still a standards body, i.e. a collection of minds, and you're one guy on Slashdot. The characterisation of them as 'corrupt and evil' because they have a job to do and they happen to disagree with Slashdot groupthink

              If your opinions are unpopular it's because they are ridiculous, not because you're smart and everyone else is stupid. :P
              • I would like to remind you that Slashdot is a corner of the internet inhabited by, well, geeks. If one subsect of a population with a mostly common viewpoint thinks you're unpopular, it's more likely to be social rather than smart :)
                • I've just seen too many people here reach for "groupthink" whenever called on a silly claim. Now I'll admit yours is less silly than most of them. But although an accusation of groupthink may be illustrative, by itself it has no substance and proves absolutely nothing- the burden of proof is on you, since it's usually likely that the majority opinion is basically correct.
                  • Trouble is, it doesn't take a degree in mathematics to notice that taking a cross-section of the Slashdot populace is going to result in an incredibly skewed dataset with regards to Microsoft matters - which is good, because I don't have a degree in mathematics.
                    • Well I can tell you that in my own case my opinion is entirely based on the OOXML specification mandating reproduction of one company's old bugs. I love Microsoft otherwise and have a big picture of Bill in my living room.

    • Unicode URLs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bursch-X ( 458146 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @10:09PM (#20080983)
      utf-8 URLs never caught on in Japan, actually URLs never caught on here. You can see much more people typing "google" or even "" in the search box in their Yahoo (!) default landing page, than typing the URL google.com (BTW Yahoos market share here is overwhelming).

      Japanese just don't type URLs they use Yahoo for searching. Many don't even use bookmarks. They just search. It's probably because they have a hard time remembering foreign name URLs in Roman letters, which except for "design" purposes don't play much of a role in Japan. It's much easier to type a japanese search term into a search box than remembering an alphabet resemblance of the same as a URL (there are two main ways of transcribing Japanese into the latin alphabets and everyone is intermixing them, so there's much unclarity about the "proper" roman letter spelling of words).

      Even print advertisements nowadays, rather than putting the company URL in big letters, they tend to have a little graphic depicting a search box and a button and give you a Japanese search term you're supposed to put in your Yahoo or Google search box.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fbjon ( 692006 )

        You can see much more people typing "google" or even "" in the search box in their Yahoo (!) default landing page, than typing the URL google.com. Japanese just don't type URLs they use Yahoo for searching. Many don't even use bookmarks. They just search.

        It's understandable with roman letters.. but I'm wondering, is this actually any different from the majority in the west? I don't think a japanese geek would search for Google on Yahoo any more than any other geek, while I can certainly imagine a lot of people using the search box for everything, regardless of culture.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Petaris ( 771874 )

        Perhaps slightly off topic but they also use bar codes a lot, they can scan them with their cell phone and immediately be brought to that web site. You will see them on advertisements, websites, magazines, etc but they don't look like US style bar codes, they are square in shape and made up of lots of little squares inside. Cell phones are huge in Japan, they are used for everything and just walking around you see people typing away on them like crazy.

  • Standards (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jaavaaguru ( 261551 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @04:10PM (#20077653) Homepage

    Another Standard, Microsoft does not support, is the specification RFC 3987, which defines UTF-8 capable Internet addresses


    This probably doesn't surprise many people here. Their mail client is also incapable of handling hyperlinks longer than around 78 characters, and their browser's not too great on the acid test.

    What Internet standards do they support properly?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Arccot ( 1115809 )
      Their mail client is also incapable of handling hyperlinks longer than around 78 characters

      That's completely understandable. If I understand it correctly, e-mail usually gets wrapped to 78 characters, plus the newline characters. Microsoft can't support links longer than that, because in fact there is no (easy) way to put a link or word longer than that in a single line. So your link in email gets split by the newline character/string. It depends on the format of how the email is written if the sending

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nevali ( 942731 )
        E-mail gets wrapped--typically--by the receiving client. With format=flowed (which Outlook does support, kinda), it doesn't matter how long the lines you send are.

        78 characters is pretty much solely an issue with non-flowed plain-text e-mail, and the vast majority of clients out there send flowed mail by default (because it removes the hard limit altogether).
      • Putting angle brackets around URLs in e-mail makes most mail readers retain the user's ability to navigate to the URL by clicking on it. URLs like this (ignoring the spaces added by slashdot) work fine in things like Thunderbird and Apple Mail:

        This is covered by RFC 1738.
        • D'oh!, slashdot removed the contents of the angle brackets.

          I was meaning that URLs like this would still be clickable:

          <http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& client=safari&rls=en&q=email+URL+78+OR+80+characte rs+RFC+angle+brackets&btnG=Search>

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by morcego ( 260031 )

      What Internet standards do they support properly?


      Their implementation of TFTP is flawless :)

      Hint: The whole RFC is 2 pages long.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )
        Their implementation of the underlying mechanism is flawed, as it cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kinko ( 82040 )
      >> Another Standard, Microsoft does not support, is the specification RFC 3987, which defines UTF-8 capable Internet addresses

      > What Internet standards do they support properly?

      Why don't you read the RFC mentioned here (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt) and see who the author is. The problem is lots of legacy software and standards that expect all users to only use ascii.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )
        So not even a case of not invented here, they simply don't support it at all?
        Or maybe they dont support it because it's openly documented but not widely used yet, preferring to create something closed and proprietary instead.

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Reemi ( 142518 )

      VTP.

      Okay, it is not a widely recognised standard but their implementation of the Virus Transport Protocol (VTP) is perfect.
    • I recommend http://www.noooxml.org/ [noooxml.org] as an introduction what this is all about.

  • Lazy implementation. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rizzo320 ( 911761 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @04:16PM (#20077721)
    Reading the analysis in the ZDNet Asia article, it's sounding more and more like Microsoft's OOXML was created for only two reasons. First, to quell the upsurge at the state government level the need for an "open document" format. Second, to force users into newer versions of Office that are compatible with the new "open standard". The standard Microsoft file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc) haven't major revisions in almost a decade. This allows users to continue using older versions of Office, rather then upgrade. Many of them have been reverse engineered for compatibility in non-Microsoft products. Remember, Microsoft has never profited with compatibility.

    If what the article is actually true, then, Microsoft might have a tough road ahead in the international community. Microsoft wants to control the format so they can lock-in the user. You can bet that even if this version of OOXML is certified, that, some revision or change down the road in another version of Office will break compatibility. Add in a lack of complete documentation (despite the 6000 pages already completed), and you have a recipe for continued vendor lock-in.

    I hope everyone sees through the Microsoft fog, and continues to develop the ODF format. If China decides to merge its format with ODF, its a step in the right direction.
    • Yes, it's just now becoming clear that MS would produce a candidate standard as a knee-jerk reaction to a threat to their profit stream.

      However, maybe this will make it clearer to policy wonks.

    • What exactly is it about OOXML that makes it a proprietary format? What is it in the documentation that they've withheld?

      • What makes it a proprietary format is that it's so complicated that it's nigh-impossible to write a second complete implementation of it. This can be seen easily in the cases where they've put in undefined modes like "do margins like Word Perfect 1.1", but even without those things the "standard" is still an utter mess.

        Basically, for a format to be a legitimate standard, it needs to be possible for there to be multiple "perfect" implementations. That will never happen with OOXML.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )
      Microsoft do profit from compatibility, compatibility with themselves and nothing else. They use proprietary protocols, formats etc, so that it's hard for third parties to be compatible with them, so customers have no choice but to use the microsoft offerings because their data and third party apps are being held to ransom.

  • Internet Addresses (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Don't use UTF8 for internet addresses, use UTF7.

    And make sure the user has the option to NOT display the "unicode" version. I'm not capable of distinguishing between UTF8 glyphs, which means that even if I inspect EVERY url, it's still easy to get pwned by a phisher.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There are domain names with non-roman character that are not phishing site.

  • February?!?!?!?!bruary (Score:4, Insightful)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @04:23PM (#20077835)
    I realize that /. isn't intended for fast-breaking news, but TFM is from February and a Hell of a lot has happened since then.

  • Consequently, OOXML does not support, to use Chinese characters within a Web address.' This would be problematic for many languages, not just Chinese."
    You don't know how many times in a day I need to put Chinese characters in my web addresses... Seriously how many other languages besides Chinese need to use Chinese characters in web addresses.
    • Japanese does.

    • google CJKV (Score:3, Insightful)

      by shis-ka-bob ( 595298 )
      First, China is the most populous country in the world. Second, Japan, Korea and Vietnam also use Chinese characters.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Vietnam stopped using Chinese characters about 300 years ago. Yes, you still see them on temples, but pretty much everything else uses latin characters with tone marks.

        • Vietnam stopped using Chinese characters about 300 years ago. Yes, you still see them on temples, but pretty much everything else uses latin characters with tone marks.

          As TFS said, it affects more than just Chinese. The tone marks are also encapsulated in the UTF-8 and other Unicode standards. So, even European, Mid-East, SWA, and African languages are effected. This would be a major roadblock for the international community - especially those who use languages other than English.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cyfer2000 ( 548592 )
        Singapore and Malaysia. If you look at a Chinese wikipedia page, you will find it gives you choice of displaying the page in "Mainland simplified Chinese", "Taiwan traditional Chinese", "Singapore-Malaysia simplified Chinese" and "Hongkong-Macao traditional Chinese".

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Daengbo ( 523424 )
          Interestingly, they aren't used in Indonesia, despite the large population of Chinese ancestry who themselves still speak Chinese, simply because writing in Chinese is illegal there. I (a caucasian) had to read characters for some Chinese Indos visiting Malaysia a few years back.
          • What? Writing Chinese is illegal in Indonesia? When did that happen, why, how do they enforce it, and where can I find more information about this?

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Daengbo ( 523424 )
              I don't have any links, just the experience of meeting these Chinese Indos and having them explain to me why they couldn't read or write, despite speaking fluently. (Off to Google it...) A Google search reveals that this apparently changed [hurights.or.jp] in 1998. As I said in my original post, my experience was a couple years ago. In fact, I guess it was during the Gore-Bush recount in Florida, because I remember sitting in a Malaysian bar at that time, watching the news.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwater ( 72834 )
        > Korea?

        In South Korea, the script they use is very unique - not like Chinese at all. ...furthermore, I've not seen them mix in Chinese like, say, the Japanese do (albeit traditional Chinese).

        • Korea stopped using Chineses script about 300 years ago, when the ruler decided that a simpler script would be easier to teach to peasants. This was later born out by the fact Korea enjoyed much higher literacy rates than China (and still does) after the decision. It was very unpopular with the court at the time, since Korea was known colloquially as 'Little China.' China was viewed as the most civilised country in the region, and Little China was a mark of respect. By stopping using the Chinese ideogra

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by TheLink ( 130905 )
            Pity not many rulers are like that king. He did a lot of other interesting stuff as well.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mathfeel ( 937008 )
      Chinese is just an example of non-Latin language. Even within Latin language, there are special accented character you can't use for URL...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by id3as ( 1067224 )
      I am for diversity, the directory names are already multilingual in many systems, therefore in making URls multilingual I see no trouble with usage.
  • We don't want to play with you.
  • Another standard is, not to use, commas like they, were going out, of style.

    Feh.

  • ..is my friend. Open Source and China? Strange bed fellows indeed.

  • Cannot Merge With OOXML (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @05:42PM (#20078749)

    they will most likely merge their current standard with either OOXML or ODF

    The tiniest bit of analysis will lead them to conclude that it is technically impossible to merge their format with OOXML, since OOXML is not adequately defined.

    • The tiniest bit of analysis will lead them to conclude that it is technically impossible to merge their format with OOXML, since OOXML is not adequately defined.
      Yeah, because everybody should stop at a tiny bit of analysis.

      Incidentally I just did a tiny bit of analysis on ODF and decided it shouldn't be used because it doesn't define formulae at all.

      • Re:Cannot Merge With OOXML (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @07:06PM (#20079555)

        Yeah, because everybody should stop at a tiny bit of analysis.

        Yes, let's torture a figure of speech. Deeper analysis will reveal that not only is it technically impossible, it is also practically impossible, so there will only ever be one implementation of MSOXML.

        analysis on ODF and decided it shouldn't be used because it doesn't define formulae at all

        It is quite easy to extend a standard to include new things, and ODF 1.1 is well under way. However, it is practically impossible to remove broken stuff from a standard, so we would be stuck with the MSOXML dog's breakfast until Microsoft abandons it in five years.

        Incidentally, are you implying that you prefer MSOXML over ODF? Wow!

        • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Nitpick: the formula implementation will come in 1.2, most likely later this year.
           
          ODF 1.1 (focussing mainly on accessibility extensions) was released last year and became the current and official OASIS version last February.
  • Last week didn't I read that Microsoft had dominated the Chinese market already. If they went to the MS OS then they will probably go with the document format. Don't kid yourself into thinking that the Chinese are this budding bright beacon of intellectualism that is going to have a fresh start. They are just like most of the PHB's around here, uuuuh the Jones' have it so I should have it.
    • And just yesterday, we read about the oncoming tidal wave of sub-$200 computers. In a poor country like China, these little gadgets should be way more popular than computers costing $1000, don't you think? There is no way that Microsoft will be able to dominate the sub-$200 market (and still make a decent profit). So I would say that the fight for software dominance in China has barely begun.
      • Ahem. I guessed you missed this Slashdot article [slashdot.org] which more or less explains that Microsoft figured out that it was in their best interest to give Windows and Office to the Chinese for free, more or less. Including access to the source code.

        Most people think that this "breakthrough" has to do with Linux actually working for them, so that Microsoft more or less had no choice.
        • Ahem. You don't think Microsoft intends to keep the cheapie pricing indefinitely, do you? And even if they were dumb enough to do so, if Windows + Office were legally installable in the Eee at almost no cost, what could prevent a flood of these cheap machines from swamping the American market and seriously impacting Microsoft's Windows + Office revenues? Nothing. So of course Windows + Office will never be allowed on the cheap machines, inside or outside China.

          The $200 computers will be exclusively ru

          • Sorry, but the American market is dominated by good and fast. In fact, most people around the globe want good and fast. We might settle for cheap, good and slow, but really we want the good and fast.

            You should avoid a career in marketing. The slogan "cheap-but-good", while an improvement over "almost as good and getting better", wouldn't be my first choice as a replacement. How about, "we run the internets" or "they trust us on servers and we have a desktop".

            Seriously folks, there are a lot of posit
            • Sorry, but the American market is dominated by good and fast.

              Because cheap-and-good has not been available til now. The Eee is the consequence of two developments: cheap LCDs, and low cost, high capacity nonvolatile memory. Without these two things, usable, inexpensive, portable computers would not be possible. And neither of them is more than a year or two old. With something this new and appealing, the buying patterns of the past are not necessarily predictive of the future.

              Face it, the Eee (or so

              • Do you work for Eee? I honestly had no idea what that was but I will google it like a good pavlovian slashdotter. Nice turf, Eee.
                • LOL
                  No, I don't work for Asus (the makers of the Eee), for any related company, or for any competitor. I am only an interested observer who can read the writing on the wall. I have been predicting the $100 computer -- and the consequent trouble for Microsoft -- for ten years, and it is almost here. We have the $200 computer now; the price will drop to $100 in two or three years. That will be when Microsoft will really start feeling some pain.

          • > You don't think Microsoft intends to keep the cheapie pricing indefinitely, do you?

            You did see the fact that Microsoft is releasing its source code also, right? I have the distinct feeling that they're not as naive in China as you portray them, and if Microsoft tries to raise prices dramatically, they'll just be hit with "we're going back to Linux and by the way, it's legal (in China) for us to use your source code for purposes of converting all the documents to ODF".

            In fact, I have hopes that the OSS
  • There is a reason RFC 3987 isn't widely supported; it's horrible.

  • OK. (Score:1)

    by WK2 ( 1072560 )
    My spidey senses say that OOXML SP1 will be coming around shortly.

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