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The conspiracy to save OOXML from being so crappy
June 19 2009
According to my balance principle, I would say that SC34 WG1 needs more participation from (non-MS) vendors to get a good balance: it is currently tipped in favour of users/governments/standards bodies. read moreJune 16 2009
I am looking forward to seeing the report from the ODF Plugfest 2009. The Dutch government is doing everyone a great service in organizing this. read moreOpen Standards are no silver bullet
June 14 2009
A new academic paper looking at running code and open standard says "A running code requirement would have led Massachusetts to defer adopting ODF" read moreJune 14 2009
Waiting on this wintery Sydney day for my flatmate's Chinese roast pork knuckle with bamboo to cook, I thought I'd check up on a suspicion that had formed in my mind: had Growlaw ever published anything on OOXML/ODF recently that was not just Big Blue's message of the week? read moreThe conspiracy to save ODF from being so crappy
June 11 2009
To see Alex and my comments as part of some denial of service attack on ODF is laughable; indeed to see the volume of what we write as a sign that there must be some large team behind us (or even that we are in some way co-ordinated) is I… read moreThe top three mistakes in Schematron
June 08 2009
After almost a decade of Schematron schemas, here are the three errors I see most often. read moreValidation using tries and feature sets
June 08 2009
There is another design or implementation option for validation, which is to generate a trie for the document, then to validate that trie. Because our schema languages attempt to validate more than a trie can represent, we also must extract a feature set from our schemas: this is true whether… read moreBalance of interest ~= Broader representation
June 02 2009
So a particular phrase in the US Federal Participation in the Development and Use of Voluntary Consensus Standards and in Conformity Assessment Activities stood out: a voluntary consensus standards body needs to have a balance of interest. read moreSupporting degradation: towards a workable Open Packaging standard
June 01 2009
I think we are missing, or have now arrived at the stage where we need, a way to declare relationships between different namespaces in standard XML documents. This needs to be part of a broadly-based open packaging standard. read moreClasses of Fidelity for Document Applications
May 28 2009
In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come... read moreTracing through a page-break style-inheritance problem with Office 2007 SP2 ODF
May 27 2009
In which I open the ODF 1.1 spec in Office 2007 SP2, immediately discover a bug with page breaks, trace it through the standards, find a workaround, then find the standard is not as clear as it should be. read moreUsing hit rates from one database to audit the completeness of another
May 26 2009
The possibility of having objective measures to test the completeness of a topical database is intriguing, read moreConformance in the floating world
May 26 2009
This article looks at some trends and challenges for document validation. The challenges come in two classes: first, raw capabilities for lifecycle support for standards; second, coping with transitions from technologies defined by implementation to technologies defined by standards with the necessary agility. read moreAssociating Schematron with documents in editors
May 22 2009
An effort at ISO SC34 WG1 to try to get an agreed on way to associate documents with schemas. Plus some recent editors that support ISO Schematron, and a link to a good video introduction to Schematron for developers. read moreRecent Posts | All Posts