|| On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:53:30 +0000 || Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com wrote:
ah> To be honest, you didn't - you're looking just at potential ah> danger of supporting OXML. You're ignoring the potential danger ah> of _not_ supporting it, and I don't see how you can reach a ah> conclusion without doing so.
The whole point is about the danger of incompatibility.
But as I wrote, that danger seems only partially dependent on whether OpenXML will be officially included, as too many of the containers will never be supported and there are too many quirks to really get things right.
In other words: Yes, if you put OpenXML into OO.org, people will be able to read parts of the documents, some parts won't work at all, others will display in broken ways and their general impression will be that OpenOffice is crap because they see how it all works marvellously at their friends machine that is running MS office.
To some extent a similar problem exists with binary formats, yes, but those were never supposed to be interoperable, so people are less critical about such bugs. Also I expect these problems to be worse.
ah> What we _need_ is people using free software which talks ah> OpenDocument natively. Like Bristol, not MA.
On this we agree entirely.
ah> My point is that if you think OXML is simply a migration path, ah> then we're already in that situation and OpenDocument is already ah> undermined, because we have the binary formats.
Yes, I understood that you tried to say that, but it seems that I am not able to explain to you why I see the situations as fundamentally different.
Regards, Georg