Why two standards? And now PDF?
December 21, 2007 8:46 am odfAvi Alkalay translated to english the Jomar Silva’s Post about standards, ISO and etc. It’s a very good post.
It seems that all the mess Microsoft made about “ODF or OOXML” will repeat on the question “PDF or XPS”. Remeber: ODF and PDF are already standards, but Microsoft wants to force the use of their formats.
Microsoft has released Windows Vista along with a new standard for non-editable electronic documents, called XPS (XML Paper Specification), which uses the same packaging concepts of OpenXML (OpenPackaging Convention) to represent non-editable documents. Who guess where XPS is standardized as another “Open Standard” wins a gift… ECMA… A lot of creativity is not needed to understand that this standard will also be submitted to ISO through a FasTrack in the coming months, just following the OpenXML opened path to that.
Cristiano :
Date: December 21, 2007 @ 9:27 am
André, não se traduz esse tipo de “padrão” como “pattern”, mas como “standard”
Andre Noel :
Date: December 21, 2007 @ 9:29 am
Valeu Cristiano…
Foi um minuto de bobeira…
Orrin :
Date: December 21, 2007 @ 9:31 am
I see no problem with another “standard.” More options usually aren’t a bad thing. If the public wants Microsoft to use PDF more instead of XPS then eventually Microsoft will do it.
Andre Noel :
Date: December 21, 2007 @ 10:09 am
We can have different types, but not different standards for the same thing. If we have two standards, we don’t have a standard.
See wikipedia:
“In the context of technologies and industries, standardization is the process of establishing a technical specification, called a standard, among competing entities in a market, where this will bring benefits without hurting competition. It can also be viewed as a mechanism for optimising economic use of scarce resources such as forests, which are threatened by paper manufacture”
Jomar Silva :
Date: December 22, 2007 @ 4:16 pm
The history has proved to us all that several products based on the same standard makes the whole thing better to users (low price, high quality, high competition, etc…), but multiple standards to do the same thing, unfortunately no.
It increase the prices to users, because the products usually need to be compatible with all standards, and the worst think - not “so visible” - is that they increase the standards fragmentation on the market.
This fragmentation has a huge and elevated cost, mainly because it takes a couple of dollars from billions and billions of users (and as you can see, we don’t have yet a well defined methodology to identify and estimate those costs).