Find an opinion regarding Digistan and its etymology above.

The guy is very funny, but the comments below are even funnier!

Enjoy

It actually depends what you call an implementation. For instance, we know that MS Office 2007 is not an implementation of OOXML. It uses another format spec (that we don’t have) and that they call OOXML and use the same extension than the ISO standard.

True implementations do not actually seem to exist, and this for two reasons:
- software usually mentioned as being OOXML implementations only implement Ecma-376 that we know for sure is not the ISO standard, although we have at this stage no copy of the ISO standard referred to as OOXML.
- software usuall mentioned as being OOXML implementations work poorly and use import and export filters. Having import or export filters is not usually considered as being an implementations. Yet, in spite of all this, these “implementations”only implement some parts of Ecma 376.

Besides this, the existing specification of Ecma 376 is quite odd when it comes to conformance. It seems anything is conformant with OOXML (a text document, a command line argument), so either everything can be conformant or nothing is conformant, which amounts to the same in both cases.

I seem to keep hearing about “tons” of implementations and “lists” of implementations, but I’ve never actually seen any. Have you?

On March 25, 2008, Brian Jones of Microsoft said in his blog article titled “Can I mention that it’s also in ODF?”:

“Remember that the standard from Ecma (Ecma 376) has already been implemented by a ton of other companies, so even if it had room for improvement, it was already serving its purpose.”

I asked him to define “implementation”, and a person named Ian Easson (I think he’s a Microsoft employee on the Vista Team) said this:

@funnybroad

Just look in past issues of this blog. There are lots of lists of implementations of OOXML.

There is also a website of implementations in Germany. As I recall, the list is 126

implementaions for that country alone. (No, I don’t remember the URL.)

None of these lists include in-house “line-of-business” applications that utilize OOXML.

Such inhouse applications are for that business alone, and are not for sale. Thus, the

lists of OOXML applications significantly underestimate the work being done by developers.

All these third parties say the same thing: it is very easy to implement.

And with the release of the OOXML SDK in a few months, anyone with Visual Studio should be

able to do it pretty trivially. And, please, no kneejerk reaction that the SDK is

Windows-only. There are similar toolkits being used today for Java, PHP,

etc.”

Then he said this:

Jake,

Further to what I wrote…

I think you do have a valid point in that many people assume that an OOXML “implementation”

means an Office Suite or tool kit that implements all of the capabilties of the standard.

The opponents of OOXML have seized upon this confusion to claim that there are no

implementations of OOXML.

I would be happier if we were all to use a phrase like “application that uses OOXML”.

P.S. It’s not just the OOXML SDK that currently does all the low-level stuff. All the

“implementations” I mentioned use low-level stuff so far, because things like the toolkits

aren’t fully capable yet.

Has anyone out there actually found these implementations, and if so, got links?

The Hague declaration recommends Open Standards, not OSS AFAIK.