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Professor von Clueless in the Blunder Dome |
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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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Tuesday, December 20, 2005Without Context, Every Open-Format Standard Is the Best
Best-Possible: a Technical Term? My long-time colleague Bill Anderson makes an interesting comment on my questioning whether and how the OpenDocument Format was really, seriously, and willfully contrived to be the best possible product-agnostic format standard for documents:
Best-Possible as the Mugging of Fitness-for-PurposeThe more I mull on this, the more peculiar the “best-possible” hyperbolic excess seems to me. It’s like describing the guillotine as the best-possible headache cure, or capital punishment as the best-possible homicide deterrent, or sacrificing innocent but foreign civilians as the best-possible prevention of terrorism on United States territory. It seems to me that even “better,” with its suggestion of some sort of situation-agnostic stack ranking, is also context-free until we say exactly with respect to what and for whom. Product-agnosticity is hardly a worthy thing in itself. I am left marvelling at how easily we decontextualize and make religious these prognostications over incomparables. Maybe its an indication of how desperate we can be to escape choice in the face of uncertainty. Although this topic arose in my response to the strange mariage de convenance that seeks to frame its crusade as an OpenDocument vs. Microsoft Office death match, I think there is a lesson here for the way we jump on fads in information technology. We want there to be one answer and we want it to be simple. And then we make ourselves crazy when our over-extended and under-justified pontifications collide with each other. I wonder if that is starting to drive civil life way too much too. No Format for All of the Documents All of the TimeI have already expressed my scepticism that there’s a universal document format, let alone OpenDocument being it. And I strongly doubt that Open Office XML Format is it either. I am aligned with the recent Microsoft statement that “the formats are significantly different, with different design points and strengths.” Fortunately, there is starting to be enough technical material that we can satisfy ourselves on the matter and also understand the gaps that separate the two approaches. I first learned about the quoted Microsoft statement from some discussion-list posts that saw the statement as making serious misrepresentations of the development history of the OpenDocument specification. I can’t speak to the timing of the OpenDocument release, and your review of the OASIS TC records may find somewhat more than “almost no material changes to the OpenOffice specification from the time it was submitted.” Although OpenDocument advocates were offended by this appraisal, OpenDocument co-editor and contributor David Faure acknowledges that although the claim of almost no material changes “is certainly exaggerated,” OpenDocument is mostly based on OpenOffice.org 1.1. So we have “almost no material changes” as another incomparable to stand against “best-possible.” That’s unfortunate, and we are each left to ponder where we’d place the judgment call on “material changes.” OO.o Already Near-Perfect?Further down in his post, Faure makes another interesting statement. He asserts that the OpenOffice [he says OD] “format was designed from the start to be as much independent as possible from the implementation of the office suite applications, and that's why it was a great basis for a standard.” In my words: little change was required from the format of the OO.o base document because it was already so great. I am unclear on the measurement of “great basis,” yet-another technical term, and I wonder how much of that conclusion was written into the premise (in this case, the TC charter’s first revision and the rationale for it), rather than demonstrated. I concede that the task of ECMA TC45, focused as it is on a defined legacy, verifiable behavior, and rigorously-defined document-interchange condition, is more-precisely demonstrable and, in that respect, easier. Abandon the Legacy, Save the Future!I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been accused of designing for the ages and told to stop it. I think of systems architecture as, in many respects, finding an organization of function that keeps the adopter’s options open as well as we know how at the time. Turning my back completely on the future is not an option for me, if only to prepare for uncertainty as well as I can. At the same time, I respect the effort to preserve the Microsoft Office document legacy. I’m a practical beneficiary of that effort (since Office 97) and I applaud the commitment to continue it with an open format standard. When it comes to avoiding anything to destabilize a code base that is in widespread use, I am also exceedingly conservative. You can imagine my surprise when Dan Bricklin used some time with Microsoft’s Alan Yates to lobby for cutting loose from the legacy in order to look toward the future. I think the concern is captured in Dan’s saying “I think this is the time before it's too late.” Now, Dan isn’t saying that there should be a complete break, but that Microsoft should be willing to consider some sort of more-or-less safe legacy-breaking changes that secure a better future. I am unclear about the speculated future that will be threatened by an Office Open XML that preserves today’s legacy of Microsoft Office documents. Perhaps it is like the establishment of QWERTY keyboards making it too late for the “better” Dvorak arrangement. Bricklin has other misgivings and I look forward to his further articulation of the exact concerns and how they are to be grounded in the concrete. I don’t fathom his interjection of browser views (an ephemeral phenomenon) as a concern over persistent document formats for interchange, for example. Somehow, we need more grounding and context. I had better start with my own work. I don’t want to immerse any deeper into any determination of when and where the OpenDocument format is superior to Microsoft’s Office Open XML file formats. It’s too soon and the question is too abstract, like seeking a linear trustworthiness metric. Here are recent details on the march toward eventual ground-truth on the matter:
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