Sean McGrath has again released a very good article where his alter ego Master Foo gets asked to give his opinion on these two document interchange formats. Please read the article first before continuing:
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2327/nlsebiz070626/
Master Foo concludes that it is not possible to create a document interchange format that captures all information and can be interpreted correctly by two different applications.
Master Foo is however talking about a 'document' interchange format, more precisely the OOXML vs ODF debate and as always Master Foo in his serene wisdom is right when it comes to interchanging this type of document because a lot of the information in these documents describes the behavior of the data instead of the actual structure and behavior is very difficult (if not impossible) to interchange. To interchange documents with behavior correctly, you will, as Master Foo highlighted, most of the time need a reference implementation.
However this type of document should not be confused with documents that do not contain behavioral information and only contain information about structure and state. These documents can normally be interchanged (and specified) very well.
Labels: data model, ODF, OOXML, Sean McGrath, xml
posted by Edwin Dankert at Wednesday, July 04, 2007
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