The premise of these articles is that the world would be a much better place if all governments would publish all of their information on the web in HTML or XML. You know what else would make the world a much better place? Unicorns.

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed. Guess what? There are no such conversion tools available. And who would pay to make sure that everyone had access to these tools and knew how to use them correctly?

Creating PDFs is trivially easy for all these cases, whether you use Acrobat or something built into your OS. It works regardless of what tool was used to create the content in the first place, and it works on pretty much every OS out there and on mobile.

HTML/XML Standards nerds should get a grip. They aren’t even in the running to compete with PDF here.

Contrast that with the process by which Adobe is submitting PDF to ISO. We’ve bent over backwards to ensure that the submission is as clean as it can possibly be, and as a result the feedback we’ve gotten has been extremely positive. If Microsoft believes their own stuff is so great, they should follow our lead and make it into a standard the right way: by proving the value of their solution, responding to constructive criticism, and building a consensus.

But it seems like this is the time to revisit the situation, because yesterday Microsoft announced the availability of a beta version of a tool called the Microsoft Open Office XML File Format Converter for Mac. Catchy name, huh? What this standalone 25MB download does is convert Word 2007 .docx and .docm files into RTF, which can then be imported by Word 2004 for the Mac. No support for Excel or Powerpoint, which Microsoft had previously promised for Spring 2007. Funny that it doesn’t export directly to .doc, though, since I thought the whole point of OOXML was its 100% fidelity with existing Microsoft Office document formats. Now Microsoft says conversion to RTF is “good enough” for those pesky Mac users:

Why Rich Text Format? RTF (once called the “interchange format”) is simply a highly convenient intermediate format for the beta converter to use; I’ll let one of our Word experts (like Rick) expand on the technical reasons why this is the case if there’s interest.

Seems to me that if RTF is good enough as an interchange format, ODF should also qualify since it is at least as functional as RTF! Can’t wait to hear what new rationalization Rick and company come up with for this one…

But that’s not all the bad news. Hidden in the announcement of the tool is the news that the release of Office 2008 for the Mac later this year will not include native OOXML capability – that will arrive sometime later (they say the tools for Mac Office 2004 will arrive 6-8 weeks later, but don’t specify a date for the Mac Office 2008 version). I’m not the only one who has figured out the blatant spin here, see CNET, Wired, and TUAW.

And that, of course, brings us back to Rick Schaut’s original rationales for the OOXML support in Mac Office. Wonder if he still thinks they made the right call? Sure feels to me like my “serious” estimate of 40 man years to fully implement OOXML support wasn’t far off the mark…