Dr AJG’s Commentary

Recently Rob Weir posted some commentary on Microsoft’s ODF support.

I am anything but a Microsoft friend, but there are many misleading points in Rob’s presentation:

• It has been clear for a along time that the ODF standard primarily tries to codify various implementations and as such does not guarantee interoperability. Why blame Microsoft if their implementation does not further interoperability either? The writers of the ODF standard are to blame.
• Why didn’t anybody notice that more than half of the files Rob mentions are not valid ODF? Microsoft’s ODF file does in fact validate. (I have used Sun’s validator for these tests.)
• Gnumeric has been supporting ODF for a while. While we don’t do very well, even we can read Microsoft’s ODF files, including their formulas. (They appear to be simply Excel’s formulas that every spreadsheet implementation needs to be able to parse anyways.)