What Happens Next on the US Vote on OOXML

Andy Updegrove writes "As you may know, V1, the INCITS Technical Committee that had charge of the US vote on Microsoft's OOXML, failed to reach consensus on either approving or disapproving the specification. As expected, Microsoft has turned to the full INCITS Executive Board in an effort to salvage the situation. Between now and Labor Day, a complicated series of fall-back ballots and meetings has been scheduled to see whether the Executive Board can agree to approve or disapprove OOXML, in either case "with comments." A vote to approve would mean that addressing the comments would not be required for the US vote to stand, while a vote to disapprove would hold the possibility of US approval if the comments are satisfactorily addressed. The bottom line is that a vote to approve (either in the US or in many other nations around the world) does not appear likely, due to the sheer number of technical issues that have been raised with OOXML, and the expedited schedule upon which Microsoft has insisted throughout the process."

US vote or ISO vote?

[jkrise]

Big difference. If it's the International Standards Organisation that's voting; it should not be subject to the machinations of the company that submits the standard under scrutiny.

According to the earlier article, V1 and INCITS were both extensions of the ISO evaluation process. Not just a US agency.

didn't know what OOXML meant

[BrentRJones]

Thought it might be Open Office XML but found out that it means

"Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) formats"

Thought others might want to know.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[KlomDark]

Wouldn't that be nice?

Unfortunately, the current OOXML (The Microsoft format) is so messy it's unmaintainable and unimplementable. Major holes, parts with undocumented binary data, etc. It's all a last-ditch attempt for Microsoft to continue it's office monopoly.

They are being way sneaky with the naming too. Note that the Open Office.org is called ODF (Open Document Format), while Microsoft sneakily called theirs OOXML (Office Open XML) - which confuses everyone, as many people think that OOXML is the "good" format, since they reasonably assume that OOXML means "Open Office XML". But it's not.

Our best attack right now is to make as many people as we can knowledgable of this name game.

ODF: Good and Open
OOXML: Bad and Closed by Microsoft. (It's not truly open when it comes to the details of the format)

Re:No OOXML; Maybe Not ODF

[KarmaMB84]

Once it becomes an ECMA standard, the specification belongs to ECMA and will not be controlled by MS. MS has been saying this all along ("It's now ours anymore, it's ECMA's"). They DO want it standardized since they worked on it for years even before ODF and it's the format for their product.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[KarmaMB84]

It's just formatting stuff that's actually considered deprecated and inappropriate for new documents. It's in the spec because if you come across them in converted Office documents you might want to either ignore them or tweak rendering a bit to make it at least not ugly.

If they weren't in the spec, it wouldn't be the complete OOXML spec used by by Office '07.

Re:No OOXML; Maybe Not ODF

[MightyMartian]

Save that the specs are ridiculously huge, and full of what really amount to undocumented references. It's not a useful specification.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

The specification is incomplete in that it references specifications that is not commonly available:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=254267&cid=199 58261 [slashdot.org]

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[Tom]

In an open market of ideas, that's how it works.

Precondition: Open market.

Reality: MS has been found guilty of antitrust violations and leveraging its OS monopoly to support and gain market its shares in other markets.

Check: The only software capable of even competing with the market leader product is being given away for free.

Conclusion: The "desktop computer office suite" market is not an open market.

It doesn't belong

[jgoemat]

You don't put something in a specification and not define how it works. It has no place in the specification. That's the whole point.

If they weren't in the spec, it wouldn't be the complete OOXML spec used by by Office '07.

So here we have Microsoft working backwards. They take what they did and try to create a specification for it instead of creating a specification and then programming to it. Then they leave out parts of what is actually done in Office '07 so that other parties can never be compliant with the "specification". That would be akin to the TCP specification [faqs.org] saying that bit 2 in byte 14 is a flag that says the checksum should be calculated like Windows 95 does it, without specifying how that is. This is just ridiculous. Do you not understand that some documents (probably all docs imported from Word 95 which I know is in the spec, I'm not sure about Word 97) WILL use this tag, and therefore anyone trying to comply with this specification will not be able to make the documents appear as they will in Office 2007? When importing a document from Word 95 or 97, Office 2007 should convert it completely to values defined in the specification, there should be no need for these tags for "backward compatibility".

If the specification has no way to make the spacing look the same, I would say that it is an incomplete specification (although it is 700+ pages). If there are certain quirks of Word 95 and Word 97 that would make the specification hard to understand, it doesn't matter. They should be defined exactly anyway so that ANYONE implementing the specification (and only the specification) will be able to produce documents that look the same.

Re:No OOXML; Maybe Not ODF

[LingNoi]

It is not useful you can't calculate dates before 1900s due to backwards compatibility with other Microsoft products. How is that useful for other office products, as a standard and for users of the format.

Re:This is so petty I can't believe it.

[mingot]

If ODF, as it stands, were released by Microsoft and called Microsoft ODF, we'd have the same level of FSF, GNU, etc pushback

Oh there would be MUCH much more.

Check the "Criticism" section of the ODF wikipedia article for a good starting point.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

[Ornedan]

This is about whether or not to approve a standard. The people who do not want the standard approved have pointed out technical issues with it, severe enough that they should be fixed before the standard should even be considered for approval. But you get to ignore all those problems, because obviously anything any of the opponents say can never be based on facts. The whole bloody point of a standard is to make choice be among competing, but compatible vendors instead of among incompatible vendors. The problem, then, with OOXML is that it stacks the deck against anyone other than MS attempting to implement it, being essentially just an XMLised dump of MS Office's binary format with all the legacy cruft included. In fact, due to the legacy cruft, no-one besides MS can ever be fully compatible with the standard. All anyone else can do is claim compatibility with most of the standard, minus certain optional bits. And those optional bits will be rather crucial, since they lock up any documents converted from legacy formats to OOXML from being correctly interpreted by anyone other than MS. Contrast this with ODF, where any vendor has available to them the information they need to implement the entire standard and the legacy documents will be converted to generic ODF markup that can be correctly interpreted by any vendor that does implement the entire standard. And as for why I fear OOXML becoming an ISO standard is that it will then automatically become the dominant standard due to MS Office being the dominant product at the moment. No need for that pesky competition based on it's actual merits vs. ODF's merits.

Re:I seek clarification

[amber_of_luxor]

Is it possible to implement with relative ease into ODF, all the features that Microsoft sees lacking in ODF?

With the behaviour and errors that Microsot insists on including, no. It is possible to convert such gems as 1900 is a leap year in an application that reads/writes MSO file formats. To make that behaviour mandatory is absurd.

Most of the other complaints that Microsoft has are trivial/non-existent.

Furthermore, OOXML can not correctly render most of the world's writing systems, or languages.

Amber

Re:The specs dead, but is INCITS credibility?

[mhall119]

As opposed to ODF with a bunch of backers with potentially unknown IP claims, admittedly incomplete spec and a patent grant only valid for versions of the specifications that are blessed by Sun Microsystems... which means that Sun gets all the say they want or there will be NO ODF revisions.

Sun made an irrevocable IP covenant that it will not seek to enforce any of it's patents associated with ODF against any implementation of the specification. This is limited to versions of the specification in which Sun has had significant participation (read: not blessing, or even agreement, just participation). This is there so that Sun can keep new versions of the specification from including elements that infringe other Sun patents not covered by the initial covenant or to voluntarily include those additional patents in the covenant, not to keep the specification under Sun's control.