Groklaw: The Way Forward -- Georg Greve Responds to Groklaw's Comments

[Sean DALY]

Georg - I posted the following comment on Groklaw today:

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Thanks, Georg, for this.

It is useful when discussing Microsoft's support of standards to look at how poorly it supports even its own standards. Look at the Microsoft pseudoformats RTF and CSV.

    * Rich Text Format: Microsoft's recommended method of saving current Word documents for use in pre-2000 versions of their software; the default export format for pre-SR1 Word 97. Yet, anyone who has ever wrestled with RTF implementation knows that Microsoft's stewardship and documentation of this "standard" are pitiful. I described here a list I built of the versions with dates (this information is unavailable from Microsoft). Arbitrary changes to this specification are directly linked to feature changes in Microsoft Word. To my knowledge, Microsoft has submitted this nine-revision specification to no standards body whatsoever; it remains an unreliable means of archiving formatted text. Should you be in a rush to deploy Word 2007, and you wish to access any documents more than six years old, be sure to install and configure the optional RTF converter; Microsoft has dropped Rich Text Format from the standard Word converter list. And should you download and run the Windows executable which contains the Microsoft Word file of the RTF documentation, read the license carefully: you may not use RTF for any commercial purposes without the consent of Microsoft, and you cannot store any electronic versions of the documentation, either.

    * Comma Separated Values: This is the main method (aside from copying and pasting) of getting tabular data out of Excel for use in any other software. Although the format name seems self-explanatory -- values delimited by commas -- the reality is much more complex. In non-US locales, the Windows system delimiter is used; in Europe, this is usually the semicolon -- this breaks CSV import across locales (files must have extensions renamed). Microsoft has never documented CSV; anyone needing to figure out how to escape commas, or semicolons, or quotes, or double-quotes, needs to set out on a journey of trial and error. Fortunately, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has a cached version of a now-offline hacker's page here. And a concerned user created an IETF Request for Comments a year ago ("...there is no formal specification in existence..."). 

Microsoft offers over 70 integrated filters in their Office product suite for opening and saving documents, but OpenDocument Format is not among them. Their refusal to integrate ODF is very clearly meant to protect the Microsoft MOOX format.

Brian Jones of Microsoft, the Office program manager who criticized ODF and the Massachusetts ERTM initiative, mentioned RTF and HTML as examples of Microsoft's commitment to interoperability. RTF's failure as an archival format has clearly shown that for Microsoft, long-term archiving of documents -- that is, more than three years -- is a very low priority.

Microsoft can act in its customers interest by publishing the secret proprietary binary formats in which "billions" of documents are locked up. There's a good reason why they don't do so: it would weaken their monopoly stranglehold on their customers' documents.

Sean DALY.