Analysis: Open season on document standards

You can take for granted that you will be able to read a basic web page, whatever your hardware or browser, because the web’s description language HTML is a global standard.

Microsoft, which came late to the web, was once perceived as threatening this universality with an “embrace and extend” policy that bolted on new features.

People saw it as a bid to take over the web, and it was certainly one of the company’s weapons in its successful campaign to marginalise the original Netscape browser.

But arguably the add-ons did accelerate the pace of change and many other companies have offered them. You accept that some Microsoft-specific features won’t work in a non-Wintel environment, and that you may need to download a browser plug-in to view Flash or an Adobe pdf, in the comfortable knowledge that plain but very versatile old HTML will run on anything.

So why don’t we have a similar global standard for basic office files? Ninety percent of these use the same subset of features that could be implemented on virtually any platform.

We have the text file for simple documents, and RTF if we need to include formatting information. But these old standbys are no longer enough in a world moving to HTML’s cousin XML, which supports much richer layers of information and can be used to describe anything from databases to word-processor files.

Microsoft has moved its flagship Office formats to XML with the new 2007 release, with quite staggering implications for computing across the world. Nine out of ten machines globally use the old binary formats; most businesses are built around them; governments are run on them.

This meant engineers who developed the formats not only had to structure all the complex needs of Office 2007 into XML, they had to ensure backwards compatibility down to the last sub-sub-option.

They beavered away for years and few people took much notice, except proponents of the rival XML-based Open Document Format (ODF). And now, with the new Open XML formats unleashed upon the world, the entire exercise has been thrown into question.