New Ideal Office Format
The last week, we had a lot of fun around OOXML in our country. Some
people take this as a death match or something that can influence
their salary and other people have fun with it.
Martin Hassman wrote
this
blog
entry. It is in Czech, but here is the translation:
New Ideal Office Format
I have created a new format for office applications. Its documentation
is very short to prevent some Linux fans
from
criticism
of its size.
It consists of five rules:
- Document content is in plaintext and in the most suitable
encoding of your OS. This has to satisfy everyone.
- The whole document content is inserted as Base64 inside a
<document> </document> element, so it becomes XML.
And XML is a buzzworld, XML is cool, so it MUST be XML.
- Don't forget to pack it as a ZIP file. It becomes small even for
slow networks.
- Concerning special formats: Dates in the document are in the
format which is used on the noticeboard by Mrs. Kotas from our 1st
floor. If you are not familiar with it, you should come and find
out yourself.
- The file suffix is *.ibm. No, it doesn't mean
ANY company name (we would be accused of being financially
influenced if it does). It stands for Ideal Buzzword
Metaformat.
Let's vote for it as an international standard. It's said even stupid
format could be proposed as a standard this year. Why not this
one?
Martin Hassman