Splat | WiseTome.com

Well, this time around, I wanted to check out the stance XML is having in terms of office documents like text, spreadsheet and presentation. I must say, that once I went through quite a lot of links and search results and charting out the chronological developments in this regard - I was tempted to title this post as: OOXML Vs ODF. Trust me, there are enough written about both the formats pitting them against each other.

In brief, OOXML is a standard being pushed by Microsoft. ODF is one, that is being developed by IBM and others like OpenOffice.org. Both are applications of XML. And as any one may except, once Microsoft is involved and happens to be on one side of a polarized pair of standards, there will be a struggle. There is enough mud-slinging going on from both sides.

For now, I defer from placing both OOXML and ODF under study. There are many arguing for both the sides, and a mere “OOXML Vs ODF” search will lead to relevant articles and blog posts. It is also amusing to note that there are several individuals who stay away from both the stands and have managed to get themselves into it. (I guess, now I am another of this group).
Both the open standards have been formed as a standard at ISO - Organization for International Standards. Due to this, many argue the sanity of ISO as to having two standards that are implemented as applications of XML.

HÃ¥kon Wium Lie at news.com.com:

In this conflict, ISO must answer a difficult question: is there room for both ODF and OOXML inside ISO? I’m not a fan of either format, but ISO should be concerned about the closeness of the two formats. They are similar in function, solving the same problems and using XML as the syntactic foundation. While it’s healthy to have competition between different standards, it’s rarely productive to have competing standards within an organization.

And then, there is an opposing view that states that both the standards can co-exist, and there should be no problem.

Rick Jelliffe at O’Reilly XML Blog:

I tend to the view that the future will never be beautiful in that kind of monochromatic (’Stalinist’ is entirely too dramatic) way, but that we need to to encourage a rich library of standard technologies, widely deployed, free, unencumbered, explicit, together with the awareness of when each is appropriate and with an adequate set of profiles and profile validators (using ISO Schematron!). Plurality. (HTML browsers are not weaker because there is GIF, JPEG and PNG, let alone TIFF, even though there is almost complete overlap.)

I could just go on quoting myriads of views of different people who are key players in the community that shapes these standards.

For now, I would just drop few links to the ever changing pages of Wikipedia for OOXML and ODF:

• OOXML
• ODF

What do you think of all this? Do you think I should wait a while and see what emerges and put it up here? Or do I just go about digging into both of them?