Isotoma Limited

Over at CNET, Opera’s CTO has written an article that rather sums up my own feelings on the battle between Microsoft’s XML-based document formats and OpenOffice’s. He also introduces something that I think is little short of revolutionary.

Both of them are frankly impenetrable XML. Just by taking their binary format and turning it into tags does not make it therefore interoperable.

Interoperability in formats, as in any protocols, is gained by providing a level of abstraction. Just providing what is effectively a list of the properties of internal objects is no good — the choice of objects to solve the problem (i.e. in the solution space in architectural terms) is effectively arbitrary. In your protocols, file formats and published interfaces you need to provide some level of abstraction, so you say things about the problem space.

I am a fan of LaTeX which does provide this level of abstraction. LaTeX templates and documents deal with structure and with core concepts in typesetting such as kerning and leading. These things are necessary if you are to publish a “real” book, such as a scholarly work.

However, LaTeX is hard. Really hard. And for the sort of document generally generated in the workplace it’s overkill. In fact most documents produced in the workplace are never actually read by anyone, so the less effort involved in production the better.

Mr Lie’s suggestion of HTML and CSS3 is a really interesting one — HTML is accreting semantic information rapidly, with things such as the microformats movement. Allowing a document to provide multi-dimensional semantic information (is it a book? is it a plane? it’s both!), and that also can be viewed ‘natively’ in the browser is very exciting. What is more important it knocks all the Microsoft vs OpenDocument stuff into a cocked hat. Who gives a damn what ISO eventually certify, if you’ve got something so eminently practical you can actually use?

The proof of the pudding of course, is in the eating, and Mr Lie seems to have done just this, producing a book using Prince.

This really feels like a major step forward in convergence to me, and a proper pragmatic step too, that leads to actual results rather than a load of hand-waving at conferences. It makes me want to go and write a book!