ISO Takes Control Of OOXML

mikkl666 writes "Alex Brown, head of the ISO work group responsible for OOXML, has posted a summary of their latest meeting, and he also comments on the resolutions discussed there. The basic message is that ISO now has 'full responsibility for the standard,' and that several workgroups will be established to work on OOXML. An interesting point here is that 'setting up a maintance[sic] procedure for ODF, and then working on cross-standard initiatives' is one of the explicit goals. On a side note, they also reacted to the very emotional discussion on OOXML by posting an open letter: 'We the undersigned participants ... wish to make it clear that we deplore the personal attacks that have been made ... in recent months. We believe standards debate should always be carried out with respect for all parties, even when they strongly disagree.' As Brown correctly points out, 'This content speaks for itself.' We discussed the approval of OOXML earlier this month."

You missed the real story with the ISO/IEC action

[marbux]

Private deal to approve OOXML? More evidence surfaces [universal-...ouncil.org] --- Universal Interoperability Council).

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

[more]

Re:The future

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, considering M$ has explicitly said that they wouldn't follow any changes ISO makes to the standard...
Or, for that matter, they haven't even implemented their own draft version of the standard in the latest Office.

I'm Sorry, Is Some ISO Maggot Making M$-Noises?

[RailGunSally]

The ISO sold its intrinsic value, in the form of its integrity and credibility, to Microsoft Corporation. Now the utterances of ISO functionaries are of no importance whatsoever, just as the standards maintained by the ISO are of no value at all. We will interpret the actions of M$ and the ISO as the damage that they truly are and simply route around them. The lesson here is that, in the brave new interconnected world, centralized authorities are single points of failure. They are utterly vulnerable to the enemies of freedom, and must be eliminated. We will therefore evolve distributed standards authorities of some fundamentally new nature. Soviet-era centralized control systems are as obsolete as proprietary operating systems. These things will chaotically destabilize and vanish to be replaced by an equilibrium of resilient, distributed algorithms.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Baseless accusations of bribery, et al, might be considered personal attacks by those on the receiving end.

The problem is that your accusations of bribery, et al, are so vague, that you're painting everyone that voted YES with the "corruption" brush. I wish you guys would man up and make a specific corruption charge against specific individuals.

For example, the Czech Republic's expert, Jiri Kosek, explained in great detail why the Czech Republic switched from NO to YES:
http://xmlguru.cz/2008/01/ecma-response-to-czech-ooxml-comments [xmlguru.cz]

Well, according to you guys, nobody in his right mind would switch from NO to YES without being bribed (or whatever), so let's get specific. Are you accusing Jiri Kosek of accepting a bribe, yes or no?

Sure, it's easy to accuse Microsoft of bribing "people" (since Microsoft is hated around here anyway, such a vague accusation will increase your karma), but bribery it is a two-way street. By accusing Microsoft of bribing people, you are also accusing someone of accepting those bribes. Don't you think that those that voted YES have a right to be offended by your accusations that they took bribes?

If you would make specific charges, naming the individuals that accepted bribes (and provide some details, like the dollar amounts that changed hands), then you'd have more credibility, wouldn't be painting everyone with the "corruption" brush, and would give those specifically accused a chance to defend themselves. But as it is, you guys don't have the evidence or guts to make specific charges against specific people (like Jiri Kosek), so you make these vague unsupported charges.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Zombywuf]

That document explains no reason to adopt OOXML. Just a bunch of "We found their answer satisfactory but we're not going to tell you what it is." It does say one thing though, that OOXML DOES NOT SUPPORT ANYTHING BUT UCS-2 FOR UNICODE!

It uses XML as a base. XML can use any encoding capable of representing the characters !"'? and =. Yet it remains limited to stone age character representations. In a document format.

If that isn't evidence of a corrupt process, it's evidence of clueless incompetence.

Re:What do they expect?

[daeg]

And now government bodies will spend even MORE money hiring IT companies because some government bodies are required by *law* to follow international standards. If the standards were passed that every piece of software make a MOO sound every 30 seconds, the bodies would spend millions making sure every piece of software mooed every 30 seconds.

Open standards were supposed to save money, but I can't see any software vendor saving money by implementing OOXML.

I will laugh when Microsoft itself can't get software certified to match OOXML's trainwreck standards.

Re:why not open source Windows?

[thetoadwarrior]

Microsoft can't pull out. Europe has excellent ties to upcoming nations. If they pulled out and Europe went Open Source or went with Apple then they risk China, India and other nations which huge populations doing the same.

America may think it's the centre of the universe but it's not and it's going to find that out quickly when the bottom of their economy falls out completely in the near future.

Re:Here's a message for ISO and the letter...

[Locutus]

This seems like an assertion bordering on wrecklessness to me. What evidence is there that MS had no intention to support the ISO OOXML?

There may be some cause to doubt their sincerity in certain respects. It is not clear that they have promised to support the ISO OOXML in their products, but they may. They may also turn around and support ISO ODF as their open format instead, so they can have extra checkboxes in their "feature support" I.E. 'MS Word:' The only word processor built on open standards that supports both ISO ODF and OOXML.

If government bodies are mandated to use an open standard, then MS has every reason to support fully open standards versions of the ISO OOXML or ODF, otherwise their products' document types will not be compliant with an open standard, and government bodies as a result can either no longer use Office, or they have to start saving documents as something like HTML/RTF/PDF, instead.

history, the reasons why Embrace, Extend, Extinguish are a longtime Microsoft trait and label, Halloween documents, and how they handled the creation of the "standard".

And from history, Microsoft can easily produce partial compliance and any failures will get fixed a year or two out and at that time, other inconsistencies will be introduced. A year or two later they might get found and the cycle repeats. All the while, slightly twisted versions of the standard are continued to be used and only Microsoft's products keep up with keeping the documents readable or formatted correctly.

Read as much of the history of Massachusetts trip down open standard file document lane as you can stand. If you spend more than 5 hours on this, you just might understand the lack of belief in them really supporting the ISO or EMCA OOXML standards.

LoB

Re:Personal Attacks?

[sjames]

It's not surprising that MS can't follow the spec either. For years, a "word document" was little more than a memory dump From Word. As they developed new versions, they just piled more crap on top and let the stuff at the bottom go to compost. That's why it was possible to find fragments of unrelated documents in a Word document.

Then, the "magic XML" non-solution popped up so they wrapped the whole stinking crap ball up in that. You can frost a dog turd and call it wedding cake....

MS claims OOXML is some sort of specification or standard, but really it's an attempt to finally document the above crap ball. It's such a mess, they can't do it even with the complete source code revision history and the active coders that produced it.

That's also why it takes 6000 pages and still makes references to things that aren't documented. MS may or may not know what they are!

So, honestly it's not a spec at all and certainly isn't a standard, it's failed documentation.