In a discussion about document formats, Tim Bray says:

Having said that, I still think OOXML is totally bogus; ECMA shouldn’t have gone near it and neither should ISO. The world does not need two ways to say “This paragraph is in 12-point Arial with 1.2em leading and ragged-right justification”. As I argued in 2005 , if you want to capture MS-Office-specific semantics (not a bad thing in principle) the right way to do it is a namespaced layer on top of ODF.

Hmm - should we apply the theory that "the world doesn't need two ways" to products, too? We had Smalltalk; what's the point of Java? We have Java; what's the point of C#? We have MS Office; what's the point of Open Office (and so on). Somehow, I doubt that Bray would agree with any of those assertions (and for good reasons).

And yet there he is, arguing for the "one true format" (which, coincidentally, happens to be the one Sun backs). Like other products, document formats can be good, bad, or indifferent. I haven't looked at either in detail, but I see little harm in letting people who actually care look at them and make an informed decision.

Tim does bring up the conflict of interest inherent in his point later in the post, but still...

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