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Monday, October 17, 2005

My FUD is FUDDier than your FUD, so FUD this!

I have been paying attention to the posturing that goes on around OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) and the Microsoft Office XML Reference Schemas (supported now in Office 2003 components) and the Microsoft Office Office Open XML (OX) that will be used as the new default format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in the next version of Microsoft Office.

Sometimes people I think are quite senior and knowledgeable seem to take leave of their senses in proclaiming things that years of experience in their organizations should suggest is not quite so bare-faced nor so simply-accomplished.

Then there is the stuff that comes up when someone’s FUD detector has the gain too high and it goes into feedback because someone sneezed in the parking lot. 

The Binary Key That Everybody Knows About

The funniest examples, if they weren’t so irritating to me, are the ones that are passed around as technical facts that “everybody knows” and quoted and referenced gleefully but never fact-checked.

One that really gets me is one that some posters have been asking Brian Jones to explain and when he does, suggesting that the truth of the matter is dependent on believing Brian or a comment on Groklaw (no kidding), when there is a simple, confirmable technical fact in dispute.

Here’s what I mean.  Gary Edwards is one of the editors of the OASIS Open Document specification.  He was interviewed by Christian Einfeld in an article published on Mad Penguin.  According to the article, Gary said this:

“.. The problem is the well-known binary key in the Microsoft's XML header of every Microsoft XML document. That binary key holds a great deal of the information that we need about the layout definitions of the Microsoft XML file format. We can do a content-based transformation very well. Microsoft's content is in perfect XML file format. Their styles, though, are locked up in that binary key. To make any kind of exchange possible with Microsoft XML documents, we have to first figure out how to cope with that binary key.”

[Update: The quote is apparently accurate.  One of the other places this story is told is in a comment on Bub Sutor’s IBM blog.  It seems to be Gary Edwards again.  So far, I haven’t found any source for this that doesn’t end up being based on a statement credited to Gary Edwards.]

I keep asking people to show me that key that is so well-known and appears in the header of every Microsoft XML document.   Just show me the binary key. 

Uh, So How Come It’s Not Here?

I went looking for confirmation.  My abandoned M.Sc dissertation draft is a Word 2003 document.  So I saved it as XML, then opened it in FrontPage as an XML document.  I used FrontPage to pretty-print it so all of the tags line up, the entities are indented, and so on.  In the snippet below, I also used Notepad to add further line breaks and indentations to make the tags and elements easier to comprehend.  Here’s the beginning of the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml"
                xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"                
                xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
                xmlns:sl="http://schemas.microsoft.com/schemaLibrary/2003/core"
                xmlns:aml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/aml/2001/core"
                xmlns:wx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/auxHint"
                xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
                xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882"
                xmlns:st1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
                w:macrosPresent="no" w:embeddedObjPresent="no" w:ocxPresent="no"
                xml:space="preserve">
    <o:SmartTagType o:namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
                    o:name="country-region"/>
    <o:SmartTagType o:namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" 
                    o:name="City"/>
    <o:SmartTagType o:namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
                    o:name="State"/>
    <o:SmartTagType o:namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
                    o:name="PlaceName"/>
    <o:SmartTagType o:namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
                    o:name="PlaceType"/>
    <o:SmartTagType o:namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
                    o:name="place"/>
    <o:DocumentProperties>
        <o:Title>TROST: Templates for Raising Open-Source Trustworthiness</o:Title>
        <o:Subject>M.Sc in IT dissertation submitted to The University of
                   Liverpool</o:Subject>
        <o:Author>Dennis E. Hamilton</o:Author>
        <o:LastAuthor>Dennis E. Hamilton</o:LastAuthor>
        <o:Revision>2</o:Revision>
        <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
        <o:LastPrinted>2005-09-26T01:29:00Z</o:LastPrinted>
        <o:Created>2005-10-17T12:47:00Z</o:Created>
        <o:LastSaved>2005-10-17T12:47:00Z</o:LastSaved>
        <o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
        <o:Words>24471</o:Words>
        <o:Characters>139485</o:Characters>
        <o:Category>TROST-2005-08-05-1021-thesis</o:Category>
        <o:Manager>Gail Miles, Advisor</o:Manager>
        <o:Company>Laureate Online Education, University of Liverpool M.Sc in IT</o:Company>
        <o:Bytes>529408</o:Bytes>
        <o:Lines>1162</o:Lines>
        <o:Paragraphs>327</o:Paragraphs>
        <o:CharactersWithSpaces>163629</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
        <o:Version>11.6502</o:Version>
    </o:DocumentProperties>

and it goes on like that.  There is binary content later on, in Base64 encoding.  Most of it is for images that I created outside of Word and then included in the document.  I gave it that binary.  There is also something called <w:fldData> that is scattered throughout my document and its short content is also in what looks like Base64 encoding.

Then I thought that maybe it is the use of a UUID as the URI of a namespace to be used with prefix dt:.  I don’t know what that is, and I couldn’t find any actual use of the namespace so I deleted that namespace declaration.  When I loaded the XML document in Word, there was no discernible difference.  It doesn’t seem to matter.

So, where is this binary key that is so well-known and such a terrible barrier to conversion of Microsoft XML documents to ODF?  Where the FUD is it?  If it’s so well known and in every Microsoft XML document, where is it?

You Mean to Tell Me Exchange Is Doing It?

I checked the Groklaw post that is supposed to be informative on the matter.  It’s apparently from Gary Edwards and it doesn’t say anything about where the key is or what it is in the documents.  It says something about how Exchange Server and IE6 are apparently in an act with Word involving a secret transformation to XML and back.  I can’t figure out what that’s about and I marvel that this is so well-known, whatever it is.  I don’t have Exchange, so there’s no way I can figure out how to test that or even care what some transient XML usage is about.  When I ask for XML I don’t get any magical key. That’s all I know.

The comment then goes on to speculate about all of the evils that the existence of this key is evidence for.  Then the comment goes off about an XSL/XSLT style sheet, XML2FO.xsl, that Microsoft developers came up with that apparently doesn’t work real great and this is tied back to the mystery key by arguing about whose experts are more expert.  I still can’t find the mystery key.

 
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