Re: [office] [Fwd: Re: [pr] Help for a marketing and technical message]

[Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org>]

On Monday 09 April 2007 12:23, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
> Thomas, Sophie, all,
>
> In order to clarify the context, it's important to explain that this
> link was sent to some French ministeries by Microsoft with a simple
> message saying that OOo does not even implement ODF correctly. So the
> point is not to decide if KOffice implements ODF better than OOo, but
> to come up with an answer to that. This is also why I put the Adoption
> TC list in copy.

Thanks for the context.
We are basically talking about;
http://testsuite.opendocumentfellowship.org/summary.html
Which is part of;
http://testsuite.opendocumentfellowship.org/

> I am wondering about the status of the test suite. I think it's not
> even in beta. And, what I don't really understand is how you can have
> both suites having a 100% support of ODF on a general point of view and
> such a different implementation of ODF at the same time. KOffice looks
> like a better implementation of ODF than OOo, and that's all right, but
> looking at OOo's figures there's no way it can reach a 100% support. So
> what I am asking here is how accurate and complete is this test suite,
> and what was the background of this tests.

Right, there is quite some confusion indeed :)

The test suite is an initiative of Intel which hired several people last 
year to write tests (based on the specification) and test the two main 
ODF implementations for compliance. I did the proofing of tests and 
testing of KOffice as well as automation of  the framework. So I have at 
minimum read each test and compared it to the actual spec. :-)

Each section you see in the table at the top of the above linked page 
represents a set of tested ODF features. The 'General' section is 
mandatory ODF stuff, the rest is all optional features.
Do note that there is no global total, just these sections.  Each section 
represents either an application or a big block of features.  Therefor if 
an app performs worse in one block, then that application has less 
support.

The testsuite is not in beta; its production ready, and has been for some 
months.  What it is not is complete. There should be more tests to test 
the many features in ODF that remain untested.  But be sure to note that 
the tests that are there, and which fail for a certain application indeed 
means that that application does not (properly) support the ODF feature.

You stated that you think that KOffice has better support for ODF, I'm not 
sure how you reached that conclusion since clearly OO has a higher score 
in just about all sections.

The background of these tests is that each and every test is small enough 
to test just 1 feature. So if the application supports the ODF feature of 
right aligning text, it will pass 1 test. For example.

Now; back to your issue at hand.
MS has made a smart move in that it plays on uncertainties. And by 
bringing to light some facts that could be seen as unpleasant or 
confusing it tries to obscure the real issues.

The real issues need to be stated more clearly; then.
* ODF is created by a large subsection of the Office industry. Features 
from all those applications went into the specification.  It is currently 
unfeasible to have each application support all those features. Over time 
this will get better.  Like HTML has gotten better and better support in 
most browsers even while at the time the spec came out the support was 
not great.

* ODF focuses on long term storage and openness of data. Never loose sight 
of that. Specifying how features work before the different 
implementations (re)invent the wheel in different sizes is in line with 
that thought.

* An unsupported feature in one application can be leveraged in another 
implementation of ODF without loosing data. (If you do loose data, that's 
a bug and should be fixed in that implementation).

So, in the end the French government chooses ODF, not OOo. And we should 
make that clear to avoid just these kinds of attacks.  ODF is open, ODF 
is feature full and ODF is the future. 
And most importantly; attacking OOo does not attack ODF, just like 
pointing to one obese man does not say anything about mankind as 
whole. ;)

But Jonathan said it much better than I did;
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/microsoft_vista_microsoft_office_and
-- 
Thomas Zander

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