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TOWARD XML-BASED OFFICE DOCUMENTS
(A BRIEF INTRODUCTION)

Contents

Sun to offer ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office. Employees to access information from back-end systems through the new Office UI (user interface), which it has named Microsoft Office Fluent. If not, use a copy of OpenOffice to open it yourself, (the odt file) and then save as xml and open in MS Word, if you want to keep using Word. Open Office opens most Word and Excel files, although some formatting might not be quite right especially if lots of shapes have been used, but straight forward documents convert OK.

1. What is happening?

Recent trends in office document formats indicate a move towards open and standard-based XMLformats. Major government agencies and public and private institutions started looking for officedocuments formats that assure compatibility with open standards, that are vendor neutral,cross-platform interoperable, and non-binary (i.e., XML-based).

Although the pressure to embrace open file formats has been felt for many years, Microsoft, withthe dominant role in office documents formats, has been reluctant to move from its proprietary,binary formats to open document standards. The situation only seemingly changed in November2005 when Microsoft, with a number of industry partners and supporters, took steps toproduce an open specification for their own Office file formats. In December 2006, thespecification was approved by ECMA International (European Association for StandardizingInformation and Communication systems) as ECMA-376: Office Open File Formats(OOXML). In April 2008, OOXML (as ISO/IEC DIS 29500) received necessary votes in theISO (International Organization for Standardization) for approval as an internationalstandard.

However, in developing OOXML, Microsoft have chosen not to support ISO/IEC 26300: OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (ODF), submitted to ISO by OASIS (Organizationfor the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), and approved by ISO asinternational standard in May 2006. The benefits of OOXML, Microsoft argued, areconcentrated on backwards compatibility with its legacy binary file formats. (see Section4).

Section 2 provides the details of requirements and needs government agencies and public andprivate institutions look for in their search for open document formats. In Sections 3and 4, I provide some technical details and comparisons of Open Document Formatfor Office Applications (ODF) and Office Open File Formats (OOXML), respectively.Section 5 is about PDF file format. I conclude with the recommendations in Section6.

2. Changing attitudes

Recently, many government agencies and public and private institutions were looking toward Astrategy for Openness. This was the theme of the Report to the Governor and Legislatureof New York State (May 2008). In its executive summary, the workgroup developedthe following recommendations (page 10 of [4]) to ensure the State’s electronic recordsare:

• Created and preserved in ways that encourage choice, interoperability, and vendorneutrality;
• Accessible to the public; and
• Kept under proposed appropriate government control.

In the state of Massachusetts (since 2005), the state agencies are required to create and save“official records” in one of the following “open” or “acceptable” formats:

• ODF (open)
• OOXML (open, added in 2007)
• HTML (open)
• ASCII (open)
• RTF (acceptable)
• PDF (acceptable)

The states of California, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Oregon, and Texas introduced bills thatasked to create, exchange, and preserve all documents in open file (preferably XML-based)formats (see page 6 of [4]). Except for the state of Minnesota, the bills still remain incommittees.

The European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) have been interested for manyyears in the use of open standards to facilitate electronic transfer of information. In acomprehensive report (2003), the Valoris consulting group, contracted by EU, identified thefollowing criteria by which competing office document formats could be judged (see[5]):

• use of open standards
• being non binary (i.e., XML-based)
• capable of being modified
• preserving format fidelity
• offering cross-platform interoperability
• supporting current word processor features
• supporting future word processing features
• being widely adopted

In December 2006, the Pan-European eGovernment Service Committee (PEGSCO) issuedConclusions and Recommendations on Open Document Formats to “public administrations” and“industry, industry consortia and international standardisation bodies” (see [7]):

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In view of the present situation, public administrations are invited:

• To make maximal use of internationally standardized open document exchange andstorage formats for internal and external communication;
• To use only formats that can be handled by a variety of products, avoiding in thisway to force the use of specific products on their correspondents. When the usageof proprietary formats is unavoidable, alternative, internationally standardized openformats shall be provided in addition to proprietary formats;
• To adapt, where appropriate, national guidelines and regulations, taking into accountthe arrival of international standards in this area;
• To consider the definition of minimum requirements in regard to the functionalitiesof open document exchange formats in view of pursuing the compatibility ofapplications;
• To create guidelines for the use of revisable and non-revisable document exchangeand storage formats for different purposes.

Industry, industry consortia and international standardisation bodies are invited:

• To work together towards one international open document standard, acceptable toall, for revisable and non-revisable documents respectively;
• To develop, applications that can handle all relevant international standards, leavingthe choice to their customers as to what format will be used “by default”;
• To avoid invalidating the purpose of open document exchange and storage formatsby offering extensions to the relevant international standards as default formats;
• To make proposals for conformance testing and to develop adequate tools in orderto safeguard interoperability between applications;
• To continue to improve the existing standards, also taking into account additionalneeds such as electronically signed documents.

Since 2006, numerous governments adopted policies of (often strict) adherence to open documentformats. These are: Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, France, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands,Norway, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland, Uruguay. The list also includesregional/provincial/state governments. (See [6] for the current list.) Further details can be found inthe fourth report ([8]) of the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the use of opensource products by the government agencies.

The universities and higher education sector must also concentrate on open document formats.The following quote from Walter Ditch’s comprehensive report ([9], 2007, Higher EducationFunding Council for England) characterizes the situation in UK, although, it applies to the UShigher education sector as well:

The report proposes that although the UK higher education sector has,for a long time, understood the interoperability benefits of open standards,it has been slow to translate this into easily understandable guidelinesfor implementation at the level of everyday applications such as officedocument formats. As far as higher education is concerned, the use of officedocument formats has now reached a watershed. There is an urgent needfor co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if thehigher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to theswitch to XML-based office document formats.

3. ODF

Acquisition of a small German software company StarDivision in 1999 was Sun Microsystems’entry into the office application market, dominated by Microsoft Office. In contrast to MicrosoftOffice binary file formats, the StarOffice package, and subsequently OpenOffice.org, used XML forits file format. The StarOffice, intended for corporate users, is priced at approximately $70 USD,while OpenOffice.org is a free, open source office application. XML format used by OpenOfficev.1.0 was developed by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) into an open standard. In 2005, OASIS submitted it to ISO for ISO/IECapproval, and in May 2006, ODF was approved as the internationally recognized officedocument file format, ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications(ODF).

Further development of ODF has been carried by OASIS. Details of all versions of the ODFspecification are available from the ODF Technical Committee home page.

ODF is an XML-based file format that facilitates the creation and editing of documents containingtext, spreadsheets, charts, presentations and graphics. The ODF specification reuses existing openstandards, or portions of such standards, and thus, it reduces the complexity of the standard itself.These include XSL-FO, SVG (scaled vector graphics), XLink, XForms, MathML, and DublinCore.Its 700+ pages of specifications is contrasted with 6000+ pages of specifications of OOXML. Agood overview of the ODF as well as its specification (ver.1.0) is available online, see [11] and[12].

There are already dozens of implementations and applications that support ODF on a variety ofoperating systems, including Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. An incomplete list includeOpenOffice.org, Sun StarOffice 8, KOffice, IBM Lotus Notes 8 Documents, IBM Lotus SymphonyDocuments, Softmaker Office 2008, Apple TextEdit, AbiWord, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, ZohoWriter, AjaxWriter, and Corel WordPerfect. The complete list, including applications for text,spreadsheets, and presentation documents, as well as content management system applications ofODF, are listed in [13].

Following [9], I list important technical advantages and disadvantages of ODF.

• Simple specifications, building on existing open standards;
• Supported by multiple applications on all platforms, including Linux, Mac, andWindows;
• ODF uses a mixed content markup model, with very good separation of content andpresentation.

Technical disadvantages of ODF

• ODF is insufficiently detailed: Spreadsheet formulae are applications defined1 ;
• Macro/scripting is not defined in ODF;
• No support for digital signatures2 .

4. OOXML

Similarly to ODF, the OOXML file format is based on a compressed Zip archive. In December2006, OOXML was approved by ECMA International (European Association for StandardizingInformation and Communication systems) as ECMA-376: Office Open File Formats (OOXML). InApril 2008, OOXML (as ISO/IEC DIS 29500) received necessary votes in the ISO (InternationalOrganization for Standardization) for approval as an international standard. The detailedspecification of OOXML file format can be found in [1]. OOXML uses three custom XML-basedlanguages to describe types of document content: WordProcessingML, SpreadSheetML, andPresentationML.

At present time very few applications support OOXML. Furthermore, even Microsoft Office 2007does not support OOXML, as defined in ISO/IEC DIS 29500 or ECMA-376. In addition toMicrosoft Office 2007, only Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X has native support for OOXML.Partial and not confirmed at this time support for OOXML has been announced by Novell’sedition of Open Office and Corel’s WordPerfect.

As in the case of ODF standard (see [9]), I list important technical advantages and disadvantagesof OOXML.

• Backwards compatibility with existing Microsoft proprietary binary formats;
• Faster operation and better memory use.

Regarding the backwards compatibility of OOXML with Microsoft proprietary binary formats, thefollowing comments are in order:

1. From Google comments about OOXML ([16]):

   …if OOXML were necessary to faithfully convert these legacy documentsto an XML format, it would have to contain the complete specification ofthese older document formats. Without this OOXML would be incomplete inits descriptions for an ISO standard. No specifications for older documentformats exist in the OOXML descriptions, and so any argument thatOOXML is needed for their accurate translation is false. Such legacydocuments may just as easily be translated to ODF (as can be seen in theway some existing ODF implementations handle the import of the legacyMicrosoft Office file formats).

2. In reply to criticism (1) above, Microsoft posted on its site (see [17] and [18]), and thusoutside the ISO scope, the binary Office document specifications. However, as the OracleCorporate Architecture group had noticed (see [19]), NO standardized mapping of binaryformats to OOXML were provided, and Microsoft refused to provide such mappings beforethe ballot took place on April 2, 2008. This meant that, except for Microsoft Office, noother application supporting OOXML would be able to faithfully recreate the look ofMicrosoft’s legacy binary formats.

Technical disadvantages of OOXML (see [9])

• Inconsistencies with existing ISO standards:
  Examples of these include: Paper sizes (ISO 216 defines names for paper sizes,whereas OOXML uses its own numeric codes for these sizes); Date and Times arecovered in ISO 8601, but OOXML makes use of an alternative mechanism whichconsiders 1900 as a leap year and does not understand dates prior to 1900 (an existingerror found in Microsoft Office legacy spreadsheets); HTML colour names (ISO/IEC15445).
• Inconsistencies with existing W3C Recommendations:
  OOXML defines its own vector graphics markup (DrawingML) rather than makinguse of SVG. This may be in order to remain backwards compatible with an earlierMicrosoft Office drawing format, VML. A counter argument to this criticism is thatstandards such as SVG may not be wholly suitable for the required purpose, leadingto a requirement to invent a new solution, or to adapt a standard to an excessivedegree. Support for this viewpoint comes from the unlikely source of Sun’s owndevelopment community ([20]), However, in addition, OOXML does NOT make useof the W3 recommended mathematics markup language, MathML.
• Cloning behaviour of undocumented legacy features:
  Several sections of the OOXML specification make reference to behaviour ofan application without defining the nature of that behaviour. For example,’autoSpaceLikeWord95’. It is argued that only Microsoft can implement theseproprietary features and therefore OOXML cannot be reasonably implemented byothers (for an extended list of such features see [21]).
• Size of the specification:
  The OOXML standard specification has 6000+ pages and responses to the EcmaInternational standardization process have argued that this is a serious issue whichresults from the failure to leverage existing, open standards within the standard.
• The use of a separate “relationships” file to hold hyperlinks:
  It has been argued that this may cause problems with the manipulation of the XML in an OOXML document and, in particular, may affect the use of he standardtranslation tool, XSLT. This needs to be clarified, as it is potentially very serious,since the inability to transform the XML would restrict the repurposing of theinformation contained in the file, and would also inhibit easy conversion to otherformats (for example to html and pdf formats.
• Macro/scripting language is not defined in OOXML.
• Specification is incomplete:
  There are elements in the Microsoft’s Office 2007 file formats that are notdocumented in Ecma-376 e.g., VBA. This may cause interoperability problems withapplications that utilize Ecma-376.

5. What about PDF?

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for documentexchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent ofthe application software, hardware, and operating system. Based on Postscript Page DescriptionLanguage (and thus not XML-based), PDF has been a de facto standard (with its specificationknown to public) for a long time). On July 1, 2008, PDF become an open standard by the ISO, asISO 32000-1:2008.

Its popularity and accessibility on all platforms has made the PDF format a convenient publishingtool in situations where the end user does not need to edit the document.

PDF/A is a variant of the PDF format for the long-term archiving of electronic documents.PDF/A is an ISO standard, published in 2005, as ISO 19005-1:2005.

Finally, PDF/UA (PDF/Universal Accessibility) is a Standards Committee formed by AIIM. Themission of PDF/UA is to develop technical and other standards for the authoring, remediation andvalidation of PDF content to ensure accessibility for people that use assistive technology such asscreen readers for users who are blind.

6. Conclusions and recommendations

In Section 2, I listed many examples of requirements and needs government agencies and publicand private institutions look for in their search for open document formats. They all concentrateon the use of open standards, on cross-platform interoperability, vendor neutrality, and on beingnon binary (i.e., XML-based).

The recent approval (April 2008) of OOXML (ISO/IEC DIS 29500) resulted in existence of twoXML-based office document standards (the other is ODF: ISO/IEC 26300, approved in May 2006)with overlap of 90%, and yet incompatible. The main reason for ECMA and ISO acceptingOOXML for submission as an international standard was Microsoft’s claim of its backwardscompatibility with existing Microsoft proprietary binary formats. At the same time, OOXMLapproach, design and execution block full implementation by vendors/developers other thanMicrosoft. For further details, see the list of Technical disadvantages of OOXML, Google’s andOracle’s comments in Section 4, article [22], very long list of problems listed in [21], and referencesin [23].

Furthermore, questions regarding Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (see [17]) raiseuncertainty of the OOXML’s legal status, and thus undermines its future implementations byentities other than Microsoft. As noted in [24], and [25], Open Specification Promise (OSP) makesits promise “irrevocably,” but only for now. Also, the OSP covers specifications, not acode, thus not permitting free software implementations. At this moment there are noOOXML implementations, even Microsoft Office 2007 does not support OOXML, asdefined in ISO/IEC DIS 29500 or ECMA-376. These problems combined with OXML’scomplexity, extraordinary length (6000+ pages), technical omissions and single-vendordependencies make alternative implementation unattractive as well as legally and practicallyimpossible.

The other XML-based office document standard is ODF. Following [22],

• ODF is developed and maintained in an open, multi-vendor, multi-stakeholderprocess that protects against control by a single organization.
• ODF openness is reflected in the number of competing applications in which ODF isalready implemented (see [13]).
• ODF is the only format unencumbered by intellectual property rights restrictions onits use in other software, as certified by the Software Freedom Law Center.
• ODF offers interoperability with ODF-compliant applications on most of the commonoperating system platforms.

Finally, in an unexpected move in May 2008, Microsoft announced (see [26]) that ODF (v1.1) willbe a supported format in SP2 of Office 2007 (due first half of 2009). This is in addition to alreadysupported PDF format in SP1 of Office 2007. Although it is not clear at this time what will be thequality/fidelity of this converter, Microsoft’s move makes the ODF a clear choice for opendocument format.

At this time (November 2008), there are two doc-to-odf converters:

• Sun’s plugin converter to/from odf (see, [27]);
• Microsoft’s supported Open XML/ODF Add-in for Office (see, [28]).

Although the use of converters, in contrast to the use of native formats, should be depreciated, theabove two converters provide a reasonably good transitional path to XML-based formats. A fewcomments about the above plugins. Sun’s plugin works in all recent version of MS Office and isbetter integrated in MS Office menus; in addition, it allows for selecting ODF as adefault format. On the other hand, Microsoft’s supported plugin works only in MS Office2007, but may provide better fidelity of conversion in some situations of the complexdocuments.

1. Use of the PDF format is recommended in situations where the end user does notneed to edit the document.
2. Use of the ODF format is recommended in situations where the edition of a documentis needed.
3. The OOXML format cannot be recommended for use at this time.

Note: The above recommendations do NOT require purchasing of new software packages.Windows MS Office users can use the above plugins. Their installation is painless and their usedoesn’t require any habit changes. Mac’s TextEdit exports/imports ODF since at least2006, while Linux users never had problems with ODF. And besides, Open Office isfreely available on all platforms for those who want to try something different for achange.

References

[1]ECMA-376: Office Open File Formats (OOXML):
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm

[2]ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Office Open File Formats (OOXML):
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123

[3]ISO/IEC 26300 Open Document Format for Office Applications:
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1004

[4]A Strategy for Openness. Enhancing E-records Access in New York state. Part I: ExecutiveSummary: http://www.oft.state.ny.us/Policy/ESRA/erecords/PartIerecordsStudy.pdf

[5]VALORIS, 2003. Comparative assessment of Open Documents Formats Market Overview. IABrussels, Belgium: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/3439/5585#VALORIS

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[6]National Governments Requiring Use of ODF:
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/Adoptions-ODF-Aug2008.pdf

[7]PEGSCO 2006, Conclusions and Recommendations on Open Document Formats, IDABC: Brussels,Belgium: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=26971

[8]Government Open Source Policies, Center for Strategic and International Studies (August 2007):http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/070820t4ht@95xopent4ht@95xsourcet4ht@95xpolicies.pdf

[9]W. Ditch, XML-based Office document standards; in pdf format:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0702pdf.pdf, or in ODF format,
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0702odt.odt.

[10]ODF Technical Committee home page:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tct4ht@95xhome.php?wgt4ht@95xabbrev=office

[11]Open by Design:The Advantages of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). OASIS ODF AdoptionTC, 10th December 2006:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/21450/oasist4ht@95xodft4ht@95xadvantagest4ht@95x10dec2006.pdf

[12]OpenDocument v1.0 (Second Edition) specification. OASIS ODF Adoption TC, 19th July 2006:http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/19274/OpenDocument-v1.0ed2-cs1.pdf

[13]Applications support for ODF:
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/AppSupport20Dec2007.pdf

[14]OASIS, About Open Formula:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/Aboutt4ht@95xOpenFormula

[15]ODF Annual Report 2007:
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/AnnualReport2007.pdf

[16]Google’s Position on OOXML as a Proposed ISO Standard:
http://www.csun.edu/ hcmth008/odf/googlet4ht@95xooxml.pdf

[17]Microsoft Open Specification Promise:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx

[18]Microsoft Office File Formats:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx

[19]Oracle: Unresolved Technical Concerns In DIS 29500 (OOXML):
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/Oracle%20Technical%20Concerns%20DIS29500.pdf

[20]K. Ahrens, What about SVG? GullFOSS (Sun Microsystems blog, 2007):
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/whatt4ht@95xaboutt4ht@95xsvg

[21]Grokdoc, EOOXML objections:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXMLt4ht@95xobjections

[22]Sam Hiser, Achieving Openness: a closer look at ODF & OOXML:
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/Achievingt4ht@95xOpenness%20w-banner.pdf

[23]OOXML Analysis, ODF Alliance:
http://www.odfalliance.org/ooxml.php

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[24]Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise: No Assurance for GPL (Software Freedom Law Center):
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/osp-gpl.pdf

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[25]Interoperability woes with MS-OOXML (FSFE):
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/msooxml-interoperability.pdf

[26]Microsoft Expands List of Formats Supported in Microsoft Office:
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21ExpandedFormatsPR.mspx

[27]Sun’s plugin converter to/from odf:
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odft4ht@95xplugin/get.jsp

[28]Open XML/ODF Translator Add-ins for Office:
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net

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Mathematics, CSUN

E-mail address: jacek.polewczak@csun.edu