Plan-B for Software Documentation

Yoon Kit blogs over at Open Malaysia about the physical size of the Microsoft OOXML spec presented to the International and national standardization boards.

You got to see the pictures of the 6039 pages in context. They are really eye popping.

Yoon also argues that this is probably by far the largest spec reviews in such short time. He puts his weight behind the request of various national organization bodies at the International Standardization Organization (ISO) to not fast track this mammoth of a standard specification. But these requests were ignored. This post is a must read!

Free Software Magazine publishes a white paper comparing ODF and OOXML the two XML office document formats that compete to become the standards of choice. The author, Edward Macnaghten has produced the white paper on request from the UK Action Group of the Open Document Format Alliance. So don’t expect a totally unbiased work, but the white paper lists a lot of comparison facts and could be useful for any project making a decision for the future office document format.

The original paper, has fewer formatting constraints imposed by the magazines format.

Rick Jelliffe, from O’Reilley, writes today about “Comparing XML office document formats: using XML Metrics”.

He used a large document, the ODF 1.0 specification, (~735 pages) with tables and images and converted it into various formats for OpenDocument Format (ODF) using OpenOffice.org 2.0 and MS Office Open XML (MSOOXML) using MS Office 2007 beta. Then he used tools to measure the XML complexity with various metrics. This makes an interesting read for people who are interested in the debate of the two office document formats or are simply interested in the value of XML metrics.

Rick concludes:

The numbers seem to support the interpretation that beta MSOOX may be quite a bit less complex than ODF 1.1 at this stage, at least in the sense of using fixed structures more, and simpler in these sense of using fewer elements and attributes. ODF is flatter and has smaller filesize but seems to include more style headers than the MOOX does. The metrics indicate that the use of attributes may be significantly different between the two formats, for example for people looking at data conversion estimation. On the application level, Open Office loads the ODT file much faster than the Word 2007 beta loads the DOCX file.

A quick warning. Rick admittedly compares against a beta version of MS Office 2007. He states that “it seems possible that the Word 2007 beta saves a lot of information in bin64 encoded form that ODF exposes as attribute values.” and that this might be of temporary nature “while the thing [MS Office 2007 and the MSOOOXML] is under development.”

In any case a story I’ll follow up with.