View: Format freedom at last? By: Larry Garfield, Monday 17th February 2003, 14:59 GMT
DataViz and Cutting Edge Software both aim to bring full MS Office files to Palm OS - a difficult task. But what if Microsoft lends them a hand? Larry Garfield explains how.
Earlier this week, both Cutting Edge Software and DataViz, two of the largest office suite makers for the Palm OS, announced plans to independently develop systems to bring full desktop-Office file support to their respective product lines, without any conversion steps necessary. That's good news for Palm users, who in many cases have had trouble keeping their office files intact when transferring them to their handhelds. (To be fair, Pocket PC users don't fair much better as PocketWord doesn't support round tripping without losing complex formatting.) Still, it doesn't address the underlying problem; proprietary file formats.
Even if both CES and DataViz develop high-powered format conversion or emulation or management systems, the chances of them being compatible with each other are minimal. The core problem is that each is working independently to kludge support for a closed, proprietary, binary-only format (MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). That's not unique to the handheld world, either. File conversion filters are always problematic when the format is not well documented. GNU/Linux office suites (KOffice, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and others) have long struggled to fully understand and support MS Office documents, as have other proprietary programs such as WordPerfect and Star Office, and to date the results are still "pretty good". Closed, proprietary, binary formats tend to have that result.
But then along comes Microsoft Office 11, due out this summer, and a new system from Microsoft called "XDocs". Recently renamed InfoPath in order to annoy journalists trying to keep their articles consistent, XDocs is wrapped up in talk of Web Services and Schema and other buzz words, obscuring one groundbreaking fact: the basic, ordinary MS Office file formats are becoming 100% pure XML.
The importance of that change cannot be overstated. To put it simply, even if Microsoft does not document the format in the slightest reverse engineering and redocumenting an XML format is trivial compared to the multi-year hassle of binary file support that has plagued every program that has tried to support Microsoft's ubiquitous files. That means very quickly we could see a well-documented, incredibly rich, platform- and program-agnostic file standard for word processing, spreadsheet, and other standard office-type applications. Moreover, partial support of an XML file format is far easier than partial support of a closed binary format.
Imagine what that could mean to the entire computing field, handheld and desktop alike. A single word processing file could be created in MS Word on a Windows desktop, transferred to a Macintosh where it is edited with Word Perfect, e-mailed to someone with a GNU/Linux system who edits the file using KWord, placed on a Memory Stick which is put into a Sony CLIE and edited with Word To Go, beamed to a Palm Tungsten T where it is edited with Quickoffice, sent over Bluetooth to a Toshiba e740, edited with PocketWord, and then synchronized over ActiveSync to a Windows desktop again. All with a single format, requiring no conversion, and each step along the way not losing any formatting, even if it doesn't support a given component of the document. That's the power of open standard formats.
Of course, Microsoft's goal intent is to do precisely that, just leaving out all of the non-Microsoft platforms we mentioned. But with an XML-based file format, slipping the Mac, GNU/Linux, and Palm OS pieces in becomes easy. Open standard formats are the future of the computing world. After all, the modern Internet would not exist were it not for open, standard, license-free formats (HTML, CSS, HTTP, and so on). It's now time for the rest of the digital world to get with the program and focus on open standards, both stationary and mobile. (The Palm part would require a little extra work on PalmSource's part, but it can be done, as we have discussed before.)
Microsoft could still scuttle the process, however. The XDoc/InfoPath system is not yet finalized, and they could slip some binary components back in. Or they could add Digital Rights Management, or worse "Palladium" and "Secure Computing" "features", that would create not primarily technical but legal problems that would essentially cripple any hope of having open, common standards. If that were to happen, the best thing for the industry would be to rally around another format, such as XForms from the W3C, but the process would be much slower. Hopefully Microsoft will realize the importance of free and open exchange of information using common formats in the modern, mobile era and not castrate its own format, technically or legally. Here's hoping.
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