NextPage Announces Office Open XML White Paper from Ecma International

WebKnowHow
Thursday, October 26, 2006; 05:30 AM

NextPage announced the availability of a white paper on Office Open XML (OpenXML) from Ecma International. The OpenXML initiative was instigated to provide the community with an open standard for word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that can be freely implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms.

“Over the last year we have worked extensively within Ecma TC45 to make significant changes for the good of the community,” said Tom Ngo, CTO of NextPage and editor of the Office Open XML Overview. “We ensured that the standard discloses everything that vendors require to implement it interoperably, that it is independent of anything proprietary, and that developers can start small instead of having to implement the entire specification.”

The white paper provides the community with a light overview of OpenXML. It serves as a guide to the proposed standard, stating its purposes, summarizing its properties and structure, and providing extensive cross references to the full specification.

Purposes of Office Open XML

OpenXML was designed from inception to represent all documents, both existing and new, in XML. The transition to an XML-based standard allows documents to be used with a broad range of:

• end-user applications;
• back-end business information systems;
• XML standards such as those for search, transformation, and security; and
• custom XML schemas that address the needs of industry verticals.

OpenXML also addresses long-term preservation for the billions of documents currently encoded in the binary formats originally defined by Microsoft Corporation since it is designed to support all of the features in those formats.

Properties and Features of Office Open XML

OpenXML supports internationalization features necessary for several dozen languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Mongolian, Russian, and Turkish. It includes enough information for assistive technologies to process documents properly. It also includes a thorough specification for spreadsheet formulas, which many firms use to run mission-critical transaction systems. It is modular and compact; OpenXML files that are on average 25% smaller, and at times up to 75% smaller, than their binary counterparts.

NextPage is a member of Ecma International’s Technical Committee 45 (TC45), which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress. TC45 has been tasked with the work to standardize OpenXML.

The full OpenXML whitepaper is available at

http://www.ecma-international.org/news/index.html#recnews