Open Document Format -- Successor to XHTML? (interview with Gary Edwards)

[Jon]

There's an interesting interview with Gary Edwards, one of the
leaders of the team developing the Open Document Format (used in
StarOffice8, OpenOffice2, etc.) See:

http://madpenguin.org/cms/html/62/5304.html

One comment Gary made was particularly bold:

"...OpenDocument is now before the ISO (International Standards
Organization) board for ratification. From there, there is no doubt
in my mind that OpenDocument is heading to the W3C for ratification
as the successor to HTML and XHTML."

Any comments/thoughts on this particular statement by Gary? And any
comments on the remainder of the interview?

Jon

[Tjerk Wolterink]

Jon wrote:

There's an interesting interview with Gary Edwards, one of the
leaders of the team developing the Open Document Format (used in
StarOffice8, OpenOffice2, etc.) See:

http://madpenguin.org/cms/html/62/5304.html

One comment Gary made was particularly bold:

"...OpenDocument is now before the ISO (International Standards
Organization) board for ratification. From there, there is no doubt
in my mind that OpenDocument is heading to the W3C for ratification
as the successor to HTML and XHTML."

Any comments/thoughts on this particular statement by Gary? And any
comments on the remainder of the interview?

Jon

HAha, OpenDoment Format a successor of XHTML,

what makes him think that?

XHTML is a very new technology and it has to prove its power before we
can talk about succesors of xhtml.

[Andy Dingley]

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 19:57:23 +0200, Tjerk Wolterink
<tj***@wolterinkwebdesign.com> wrote:

Jon wrote:

"...OpenDocument is now before the ISO (International Standards
Organization) board for ratification. From there, there is no doubt
in my mind that OpenDocument is heading to the W3C for ratification
as the successor to HTML and XHTML."

Any comments/thoughts on this particular statement

The smartest thing TB-L ever did when first drawing up HTML wasn't what
he put in, but what he left out. HTML is not usable as a document
transfer format. This has turned out to be an unbelievable good thing,
with hindsight. The rightness of this decision can be seen by M$oft's
attempts to push it the other way, whenever they try to pretend Word is
a HTML authoring tool.

If HTML _had_ been a document format, then it would have killed "the
web" stone dead. It would have stormed the global consciousness in just
the same way that TeX did. Your grandmother now buys knitting wool
online - now _that_ is a synergy between open protocol stacks and
device-independent rendering. This only happened because HTML sticks to
what it does and doesn't try to be a feature-bucket for every bloatware
application around.
XHTML is a very new technology

It's over 5 years old. How much longer do you need to wait?

[Timothy Murphy]

Andy Dingley wrote:

"...OpenDocument is now before the ISO (International Standards
Organization) board for ratification. From there, there is no doubt
in my mind that OpenDocument is heading to the W3C for ratification
as the successor to HTML and XHTML."

Any comments/thoughts on this particular statement

I must say I found the Open Document format excessively complicated.

As far as I could see, to use it on my Linux laptop
requires either OpenOffice or KOffice;
OpenOffice is effectively unuseable on my machine,
while I have not yet worked out what KOffice is exactly,
or how to run it.
(There does not appear to be an application called koffice on Fedora-4,
although there are innumerable koffice* RPMs.)
If HTML _had_ been a document format, then it would have killed "the
web" stone dead. It would have stormed the global consciousness in just
the same way that TeX did. Your grandmother now buys knitting wool
online - now _that_ is a synergy between open protocol stacks and
device-independent rendering. This only happened because HTML sticks to
what it does and doesn't try to be a feature-bucket for every bloatware
application around.

While I agree with your conclusion, your remark seems very unfair to TeX,
which succeeds for precisely the same reason as HTML,
namely that it just does what it says on the tin,
and does not eg try to include graphics as many pressed Knuth to do.
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: [phone]
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

[Peter Flynn]

Andy Dingley wrote:

The smartest thing TB-L ever did when first drawing up HTML wasn't what
he put in, but what he left out. HTML is not usable as a document
transfer format.
Actually it can be -- just. Not very usefully, but for an interim period
[between the slow demise of early attempts to get arbitrary SGML onto the
Web (eg Panorama) and the appearance of XML] it had its uses, and it was
better than some of the alternatives :-)
This has turned out to be an unbelievable good thing,
with hindsight. The rightness of this decision can be seen by M$oft's
attempts to push it the other way, whenever they try to pretend Word is
a HTML authoring tool.

If HTML _had_ been a document format, then it would have killed "the
web" stone dead. It would have stormed the global consciousness in just
the same way that TeX did.
Interestingly, LaTeX and ConTeXt have been having a growth period, as
people discover they make excellent batch formatting tools for text
converted out of XML via XSLT, as an alternative to XSL for making PDFs.
Your grandmother now buys knitting wool
online - now _that_ is a synergy between open protocol stacks and
device-independent rendering. This only happened because HTML sticks to
what it does and doesn't try to be a feature-bucket for every bloatware
application around.

It took a lot of battering, though, trying to prevent interested parties
adding hundreds of extra meaningless elements. When you have a few spare
minutes, browse the logs of the IETF HTML WG which are preserved for
posterity at https://listserv.heanet.ie/html-wg.html

XHTML is a very new technology

It's over 5 years old. How much longer do you need to wait?

XHTML will probably go the same way as HTML. Useful for displaying stuff
in browsers, but long-term not a sensible format for storing documents.

///Peter
--
XML FAQ: http://xml.silmaril.ie/