5 augustus 2009

Het Fraunhofer Instituut publiceerde in juli een ‘white paper’ waarin op een zeer gedegen manier een onderzoek werd ingesteld naar de interoperabilitet van de veel bediscussieerde XML-bestandsformaten, uiteraard met name het Open Document (ODF)-bestandsformaat en het OOXML-formaat. De conclusie van het rapport is veelzeggen: ‘It may be concluded that many of the functionalities, especially those found in simpler documents, can be translated between the standards, while the translation of other functionalities can prove complex or even impossible. Frequently in individual cases it has to be decided, if the conversion of a document is completely translatable, translatable only to a limited extend or not at all. The individual cases are determined by different constraints. First and foremost translatability depends on the document itself together with its characteristics. In addition the application or tool used for the transformation has also to be considered. In this study statements on translatability and its quality in principle are made. As the rules used for transformation are not standardized however, each application is allowed to use its own specific rules. Under certain circumstances specific rules can neglect certain properties and make specific assumptions which could enhance translatability. In addition, the direction of the transformation has to be considered. In many cases a document can be translated without any major loss from one format to the other. Even so, on a round-trip conversion it cannot be guaranteed that the initial document and the document resulting from the conversion will be identical’. Wij vonden deze studie van dermate grote betekenis dat wij besloten hebbendie hier te moeten publiceren.

Continue reading →