OOXML Will Pass Amid Massive Irregularities

Tokimasa notes a CNet blog predicting that OOXML will make the cut. Updegrove agrees, as does the OpenMalasia blog. Reports of irregularities continue to surface, such as this one from Norway — "The meeting: 27 people in the room, 4 of which were administrative staff from Standard Norge. The outcome: Of the 24 members attending, 19 disapproved, 5 approved. The result: The administrative staff decided that Norway wants to approve OOXML as an ISO standard." Groklaw adds reportage of odd processes in Germany and Croatia.

Gross sounding title

Sounds like something a gastroentorologist would diagnose.

Re:Gross sounding title

It is.

Re:Gross sounding title

The end product is about the same.

This is getting ridiculous

This is insane.

No day goes by without hearing from some croporate giant running roughshod over the laws, procedures or institutions of democratic countries.

The United States have let a handful of mega-croporations totally wreck it's economy with the blessing of the government that was elected while pulling the wool over the electorate's eyes.

It is time for the people to revolt, and put the croporations back to where they belong by firmly asserting the power of the government over croporations, if need by, by the croporate death penalty and the confiscation of the croporation's assets.

The government has thoroughly been subverted by croporate cronies; those should be charged with subversive sedition and thrown in jail and the key tossed in the Marianas trench.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

It seems this has little to do with the USA though. I agree with most of your points, but the countries listed can grow a pair too, you know!

Re:This is getting ridiculous

Microsoft's core competency has always been in corporate deals, politicking and product positioning rather than actually making a product good enough to stand on its own merits. This can work for a while, but my prediction is we are near to the end game of this strategy.

Well that is because laws are inherently meant to:

Be broken! Or at least bent. An old relative of mine, years ago when I was a child said that the laws are merely a fence, which keeps bovines in their place. Big dogs jump over them and little puppies slink under them, but only bovines are kept in check.

It sounds far better in its native tongue than it does translated to english, but pay heed that this holds true regardless of the country.

Likewise, for running roughshod over laws, most laws aren't written to help "the people" and never were. Recall the "regulative restrictions" placed upon CB (citizen's band) radios in the USA, requiring that individuals pay a 10 dollar license fee and getting "registered".

It was a shitty law meant to squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip. People did not comply, at all. When the regulation was reduced to mere "sign a form so we know you have one" (aka registration) people still refused. As a result, the whole thing was dropped formally due to "mass non compliance".

Irony? People still want to have legislators set the rules, when the simple rule is, as always has been, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but do it first and do it well." The legislators know this, which is why, regardless of the country or the century or the millenium, all governing bodies fuck the people good and hard, and then pretend it is someone else's fault.

"It is the free market's fault. It is the free individual's fault. It is society's fault."

If people disapprove of Microsoft's standards, then they should NOT USE THEM! PERIOD!! There are plenty of competing standards, and plenty of clean open source software out there. Use it, or lose it. Just like freedom. It isn't granted by others. It is freely available to those who would make use of it and be cognizant of its presence and benefits. Period. Everything else on this subject is bullshit excuse making from impotent and incompetent wimps unable to stop from penis envy with Bill Gates. Instead of trying to "beat" the big boys, start actually side stepping them. Like the airlines and the big telecoms, they are ALL obsolete. So is central government and big agencies and militaries. The world's people will never see this, regardless of how blatantly visible it is to some of us. Stop asking for others to prohibit all options you can have, and exercise the power of your choice and your wallet. You don't like Gates or Microsoft? Don't buy their shit. Don't like starbucks? Don't buy their cappucinos (in fact I make a far nicer one at home, and I get to put rum in mine too!!) Get used to it. If you don't approve of a company, STOP GIVING THEM PRESS... stop buying their products, and instead promote those that espouse the beliefs and values you support. I use Linux and BSD and rarely if ever drop back to windows to play a game WINEX doesn't support yet. That's it. My choices? Yes. Took me four years to find and purchase the right wireless cards I wanted. Did I switch back to windows because WPA supplicant didn't work right when they first started? No, I merely did without wireless and went so far as to patch mine in a crude and unapproved fashion. The fixes are in and it works okay now. I made choices. So should you. Stop being angry. It helps nothing and wastes your energy pointlessly.

Hope my advice helps. I spent a lot of time being angry and political campaigning, here and IRL. None of it helped. Letting go, and voting with my walleet and my feet helped more. Try it.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

Why? Because government has an entire intelligence agency at its disposal and regulatory control over the media? Wake up call: In the western world, for all intents and purposes Big government == Big corporate.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

Considering that the RIAA and others are lobbying for just those rights for companies I'd be worried...

Re:This is getting ridiculous

I don't think it's necessarily _illegal_ corruption (flat-out bribery) that people are complaining about; a company can still stay within the law while doing nasty, immoral stuff. Think about the sea of lobbyists and the resultant corporate influence in the US: legal, but still reprehensible.

Add that to the fact that the vast majority of people haven't heard of, or simply don't give a rats ass about, the ISO process. Tada, they can pull these kinds of shenanigans without much risk of a public opinion backlash.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?

Obviously, you didn't RTFA. The German, Norwegian and Croatian members whose votes were essentially negated have all blown the whistle and it's having just as much effect as the detailed account of Dubya's lies about Iraq has had on continuing the war he started. I think people in many countries, starting here in the good old USA, should start reading some history; e.g., "When in the course of human events...."

Re:This is getting ridiculous

I'm with AC here. Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are /all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower? Or is it just that, whatever you may think of the standard, Microsoft, etc, that OOXML just has enough to get past? I know it's an ugly concept, but it seems more plausible. And only natural / human that when your championed standard/objections to something are overlooked/fail, that you look for a culprit, any culprit, that overlooks your own weaknesses and / or failings?

That's more what it seems like to me, despite my personal objections and issues with OOXML.

In my country, Uruguay, they were not corrupt. They were just ignorant. The vote of government organization was in the line of: we don't really know what this is all about, but MS software is important to us, so we think it's OK to standardize it. Vote YES.

I think that, because this is a key issue for MS, they exploited the system in every way they could, you don't even need corruption in most places, if the have the right vulnerabilities.

The reason why we are all saying that it can't be possible that they accept it is that some of us read the standard, of excerpts from it. The complaint is that, even to lay people, it is very easy to see it's not a standard at all, and tries to standardize an area that already has a real standard approved (ODF), without improving on it. It should be easier to spot for standards specialists. There are issues where you can have different opinions, but this seems too clear cut to even be discussed.

A standard should be something that allows you to test compliance. OOXML, in lots of points does not help you build a compliance test. Of course, those tags that say your should render content as Word9x come to mind. That is why it's so clear to me that I can't be approved, in its current form. Of course, it could be improved and become a standard, but it has not happened yet.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

When 19 out of 24 *VOTE NO* to a proposed standard
and it still passes, there's something wrong in
Norway.

The simplest answer is usually the best answer.

Can ISO de-recognise standards?

If OOXML passes and the ISO finds out about the ir-regularities; and later the uselessness of the standard; can it meet again to de-recognise the standard? If so what is the procedure for this?

Re:Can ISO de-recognise standards?

Standards can be withdrawn by committee. From the ISO website [iso.org]:

All International Standards are reviewed at the least three years after publication and every five years after the first review by all the ISO member bodies. A majority of the P-members [participating members] of the TC/SC [Technical/SubCommittee] decides whether an International Standard should be confirmed, revised or withdrawn.

Withdrawing standards isn't unprecedented [iso.org], and they've even considered withdrawing JPEG entirely [imaging-resource.com].

Standards process failure?

I personally see the passive of OOXML as sign of a failure in the standards process. This thing in no way should pass, and there ought to be some sort of punishment for the attempts to subvert the integrity of the process by MS.

The ISO has just lost their credability

This kind of shocking. The ISO, an organization which has existed in high regard for sixty years, is done. They will no doubt continue as a holder of legacy certifications that will continue to matter for as long as they are not superseded, but as far as a respected body they are over. In a single act they have completely discredited their own approval process and by extension everything they approve.

No one looking to establish a new, credible, standard in an field relating to software or information exchange will ever use them as a prime standards body again. They are now a marketing term and not a professional resource.

Microsoft has made enemies this week

The EU is already investigating their influence on the OSI process, countless of companies are pissed that their voices were not heard due to Microsoft bribes and whatnot, the media will love this one. I seriously think Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot here. Big time.

want to read the standard writeups? - ODF & OO

ODF:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1.pdf [oasis-open.org]

OOXML:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%201%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%202%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%203%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%204%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%205%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]

Re:I Don't Get It?

Um, do you understand how OOXML is set up? it's not like ODF or anything at all.

http://www.noooxml.org/open:rejectooxmlnow/ [noooxml.org]

^ Some reasons

I myself am no critical analyzer of standards, but the fact that the standard will still have a microsoft copyright on it is enough for me to say no. If, let's say, it was adobe instead of microsoft (and isn't pdf, for there are opensource implementations of pdf), I would still have the same viewpoint.

Standards shouldn't have disclosed code in, which is why I believe if something like a document format is standardized, the source code should be open to all.

If I am wrong about OOXML in that way, someone correct me.

Reasons to hate OOXML

1. OpenDocument already exists. What good does a second format, based on identical principles, do for the world? 2. OOXML requires the use of patented algorithms, which makes open source developers nervous, especially when a company that despises open source and has an ongoing campaign to kill the open source movement happens to be the patent holder...and happens to be pushing the format. 3. OOXML is exceedingly difficult to implement, giving Microsoft an automatic advantage over everyone else and forcing us to play catch-up (though OOo3 will have native support, IIRC). 4. This is /., and the format is Microsoft supported. What did you expect?

Re:I Don't Get It?

From http://www.noooxml.org/open:rejectooxmlnow [noooxml.org]

20 good reasons to disapprove OOXML

1. ISO's "Fast Track" process was abused for standard development 'on the fly'. In the past ECMA has "fast tracked" small (50-500 page), mature and industry accepted standards. OOXML is large (6000+ pages) and immature. An editorial of Redmond Developer News described: "By contrast [to ISO 26300], the Microsoft OOXML specification takes what might be called a kitchen sink approach." -- an ISO process is not thought to become a kitchen sink for half-baked ECMA standards. OOXML was only released in 2006 and is hardly accepted by the industry. The OOXML community around the format is a community of one. All third party supporters have contractual relations with the vendor. The limitations of the "Fast Track" process; fast evaluation time frames, extremely limited time to resolve all the concerns and little room for modification has demonstrated that the "Fast Track" process was unsuitable for OOXML. It gives us little surprise as the process was never intended for standard development.
2. OOXML is a proposed parallel standard without a justification. No empirical evidence was provided for the assertion that OOXML faithfully represents the corpus of existing documents of a specific vendor as opposed to the existing ISO standard or customized versions thereof. ECMA's branding of the format as a silver bullet for archiving cannot be tested by NBs. Additionally ECMA failed to provide a mapping between the legacy binary formats and OOXML. The binary legacy specifications was only made public in 2008. Multiple standards for the very same purpose with conversion issues undermine the respect for ISO standardization. You need a consistent justification to adopt another ISO standard for the same field which is not build upon an existing ISO standard - not to mention backwards compatibility to ISO 26300 architecture.
3. OOXML's ISO agenda is to undermine the adoption of the existing ISO Office standard. OOXML evangelist Mahugh explained: "When ODF was made an ISO standard, Microsoft had to react quickly as certain governments have procurement policies which prefer ISO standards. ... Microsoft therefore had to rush this standard through. Its a simple matter of commercial interests!" A disapproval would motivate the submitter to contribute to the existing ISO Office format, ODF (ISO 26300). We find historical precedence for a proposed Microsoft standard being disapproved in order to constructively motivate harmonization of standards: the Microsoft VML and W3C SVG standards. Microsoft's VML was rejected at the W3C in favour in Adobe's SVG. Microsoft's response was to join the W3C working group to improve SVG which later became a W3C standard. To the extent that SVG is incorporated into ISO/IEC:26300 SVG is an official ISO/IEC/ITTF international standard.
4. OOXML is incompatible with ISO/IEC and WTO Technical Barrier to Trade (TBT) basic principles, which ISO/IEC are supposed to respect. The BRM added the notion of "Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office 2008 inclusive" to which products' formats a 'faithful representation' is sought by the proposed ISO standard. International standards are not permitted to discriminate specific vendors positively, and thus all competitors negatively. The standard would become a technical market barrier, a tool of unfair competition. Formally a standard is supposed to avoid referencing products. Non-compliance with WTO requirements on technical barriers to trade due to formalities will be an obstacle for the adoption of OOXML in the public sector and undermine trust in the ISO label.
5. The BRM heavily amended those ECMA 'dispositions of comments' it had time to discuss. The BRM only discussed about 10% of the known technical issues. Of 54 non-editorial issues covered in detail, 48 were modified at the BRM. This left 850 issues without check-over, and pushed through by a bulk vote. These 850 issues were not discussed by the BRM, not modified, and so we can assume that 90% of ECMA dispositions are immature. You can have a look at the approved ECMA dispositions and you will find:
6. Bulk approved ECMA dispositions are poor in quality and do not address the technical issues sufficiently. For example, GB-0634 raises concerns on the non-descriptive and inconsistent names ("t", "mid" or "b"). ECMA responds by defining new names ("top", "center, "bottom") additionally. The UK delegation voted against this proposal, but due to the "approve" voting bloc, it was 'approved' by the BRM. This is one example of bad dispositions being voted through due to the time contraints at the BRM.
7. There are contradiction in the dispositions which were 'approved' by the NBs in the BRM. A common example: both Response 222 and 691 were "Accepted" in the paper voting in the BRM, and they contradict each other in terms of the editing instructions and the concept of whether XML schema contained in the text or in the electronic annex have primacy. This particular example is further confused, as the entire schema is being copied into the document as part of the restructuring of the draft standard into a multiple part standard. In other words, there are now at least 3 copies of the schemas, with some question as to which is the definitive copy. It is unknown how the editor will resolve contradictory binding BRM resolutions. He is supposed to deliver the final text.
8. There will be no Finalized Text for National Bodies to vote on. The results of the BRM only emits editorial changes. The National Bodies' final decision will be based on the BRM editors instructions (which contains complex and big structural changes), 2300 page ECMA proposed disposition (which may or may not have been approved by the paper vote) and the original 6000 page document. National Bodies are expected to 'approve' a large body of text which is unconsolidated. This is irresponsible.
9. The text is not compliant with the "Rules for the structure and drafting of International Standards" (ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2, 5th edition). The text is an heterogeneous construct, and it disregards the ISO/IEC basic quality and consistency principles. Naming conventions are not defined, the same element names have multiple definitions withing the spec ('e' has 18 definitions) and the same feature has multiple names across the different parts ('jc'/'alignment'/'pPr' all mean 'text alignment').
10. OOXML reinvents the wheel, it suffers from a syndrome also known as 'not invented here'. Throughout the spec, OOXML goes on to ignore industry accepted, vendor neutral and mature standards like SVG, MathML, XForms and even XML. The most prominent example is the neglection of MathML where OOXML defines its own formula markup language (OOMML). The argument provided by Microsoft on why MathML was avoided was because MathML cannot be extended to cater for change tracking. But XML is defined as eXtensible.
11. OOXML has patent issues. the BRM has adopted, contrary to the requests of some National Bodies, to recommend patented and royalty bearing audio (MP3) and video (MPEG2) formats for producers [and consumers] that want interoperability. Even though the word should is used it is, in practice, a must since the purpose of a standard is interoperability.
12. OOXML still requires undisclosed copyrighted material from Microsoft Office. The previous problem of Border Style art being undisclosed was acknowledged and fixed on February 22nd 2008 however Part 4 2.18.94 ST_TextEffect (Animated Text Effects) describes VML art that is not included in the specification. The end result is identical to ECMA-376 (see http://openiso.org/ECMA/376/Part4/2.18.101 [openiso.org] ) in which copyrighted material is referenced only by name and without disclosing the material.
13. Vague Conformance Clause for Conforming Applications. The approach used in the current draft of DIS 29500 is fatally flawed in terms of interoperability, as the conformance clauses create a situation where almost any application could be considered conforming. It allows 'cp', 'pkzip', 'cat' and even the 'Recycle Bin' / 'Trash' to be considered conforming OOXML applications.
14. Revamped XML schemas have not been reviewed. The current version of the draft standard comprises three copies of the XML schemas describing the various markup languages that comprise OOXML: Normative XML fragments in the run of the text (to be moved into an appendix), full schemas listed at the end of the Markup Part, and annexes containing copies of the schemas. All of the schemas were duplicated in order to create a strict and transitional schema for each document type (word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation). These new schemas have never been seen, and have never been reviewed.
15. OOXML does not provide the Binary to XML mapping which is required to fully represent the existing corpus of user documents. No other application supporting OOXML will be able to faithfully or fully recreate the look of Microsoft's legacy binary documents. Although the binary Office document specifications have been posted by Microsoft (15 Feb 2008), no standardized mappings were offered during the BRM, as requested by the US, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Malaysia, amongst others. Binary mappings explain how to translate a binary document into OOXML, or provide standardized guidance on how to "represent faithfully" legacy documents. Without standardized mappings, the same binary source document will produce different OOXML documents in Microsoft Office, Apple iWork, OpenOffice.org, etc., breaking interoperability and preventing the realization of OOXML's stated goal of preserving legacy documents.
16. Macro functionality is not properly defined. Section 2.16.5.41 defines a "MACROBUTTON" field that allows the definition of a button in the document that will trigger a macro. But little is said about how the macro is stored, bound, what API's are available, or what the security model is for this feature. ECMA's disposition (approved in batch by the BRM without discussion or opportunity for objection), was something quite different and unsatisfactory. ECMA simply added: "The mechanism by which the command specified by text in field-argument-1 is located and/or executed by an application is "implementation-defined". Unfortunately, with this addition, not only is it impossible to have cross-platform interoperability of this feature, it is unlikely that vendors will be able to implement a reasonable security policy to detect, scan or block macros included in documents.
17. Markets cannot rely on ISO standards with calculation errors. Spreadsheet formulas still result in calculation errors. Although the CEILING function was recognised to have a legacy bug and fixed during the BRM, there exist more mathematical inaccuracies in OOXML's spreadsheet function. The FLOOR function has been identified to have a similar mathematical inaccuracies for negative numbers. This is a problem that needs to get carefully studied. We recall that Intel faced a consumer scandal and losses when their new Pentium chip was found to have a calculation error. The Y2K problem, a standardization issue, resulted in billions of investment for damage control.
18. OOXML still allows for 5 date types due to wording weaknesses. Although the issue with Dates was discussed and approved at the BRM, weak "standard terminology" is used to imply that only ISO 8601 is to be used. This leaves room for the serial numbered dates to be used in place. Thus eventually 4 different serial date types will conform as OOXML documents.
19. There are even more technical errors. Fast-Track permitted the National Bodies to review the specification and submit comments but there was a deadline for the submission. The standard proponent obstructed the work in many national committees where participants wanted to see valid technical issues addressed. Some member states were for instance unable to vote and submit their comments. An impressive number of 3500+ comments survived the anti-comments campaign. NB need to keep in mind all the issues their own committee did not find and submit. Even ECMA submitted comments on their own proposed standard. Past the september ballot new issues emerged when participants read the documents again and looked for ways to resolve the comments. IBM reported to the US standard body: A random sample of 12 pages found 19 technical defects, with serious concerns such as: Storage of plain-text passwords in database connection strings, Undefined mappings between CSS and DrawingML, further errors in XML Schema definitions and dependencies on proprietary features of Microsoft Internet Explorer. None of this was raised prior to the September 2007 ballot and no new issues could be raised at the BRM.
20. OOXML's poor quality would have a significant impact on SC34 in the coming years. It does not serve any National Bodies interest to approve and publish an ISO/IEC standard with significant questions about its quality and a complete lack of a finalized text. 'Defect Reports' and 'Requests For Interpretation' will completely swamp the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 participants and the national participants over the next 2 years with a substantial amount of administrative work and unfortunately diminish the perception of an ISO 29500 standard and, possibly, decrease the market acceptance of the standard.

Re:I Don't Get It?

Because, unlike most other other ISO standards for documents, like fax G3 and G4 compression, and ODF (Open Document Format) OOXML literally cannot be implemented by anyone other than Microsoft. This is not because the entire rest of the world contains no competent programmers, but because the standard simply does not have enough information to do so. Microsoft wrote the proposed standard with what amount to calls into their libraries of legacy Word code, the actions of which are NOT documented, rather than "tag X requires an indent level of 30000 millipels from the indent level of the enclosing block", or whatever.

The entire purpose of OOXML is to subvert the increasing call for public documents to be stored in a format that can A) be read without buying Word/Office/..., on the theory that documents created in a citizen's government should be available to those citizens without paying a corporate "tax", and B) that by documenting the format of the documents, readers/editors can be created, as needed, at a future time when the original creation tool may no longer exist or have a computer on which to run, unlike, say, Word documents, where support for older formats is simply dropped by Microsoft.

Microsoft is an ongoing criminal organization, and as such, should be seized under the RICO act, and its parts sold off or its source code simply published for those parts without buyers, and the buyers should be forever blocked from forming a cartel, single company, sharing directors, ... to prevent a resurrection of Microsoft.

Re:I Don't Get It?

Why does /. hate OOXML so much? Every time a story is ran about OOXML, everyone on /. seems to scream revolution and blasphemy.

1. It's a 6000-page spec (plus another 1500 or so pages in response to negative comments from the September ballot). For a facetious answer as to why /. hates that, see the results of the current poll about how many books a year slashdotters read.

2. It violates ISO guidelines in that rather than referring to existing standards wherever possible, it invents new (and broken) ones. E.g. MS vs ISO country codes, MS vs ISO date handling (including broken leap years), MS vs ISO color codes, MS vs ISO's math markup, etc, etc.

3. It's under-specified, e.g. tags like 'lineSpaceLikeWord95'.

4. Even assuming it were specified well enough to implement, such implementations would be at risk of Microsoft patents, notwithstanding Micosoft's so-called patent pledge (which amounts to promising not to sue hobbyist programmers who develop 100%-compliant code in their basements, but doesn't extend that promise to anyone else or to anyone sharing or actually using the code).

5. For more, see the thousand or so comments brought to the BRM and not individually addressed, or the hundreds of additional problems found with the spec since the BRM.

While some people probably wouldn't touch MS-OOXML even if it were perfect (and it's a long way from that) simply because it came from Microsoft, the vast majority of its nay-sayers are complaining about it's piss-poor technical quality, and would be doing so no matter who originally authored such a crappy spec.

Anyone who has ever had to try to develop software from a self-contradictory, ambiguous and incomplete specification -- which probably includes a fair percentage of slashdotters -- rightly runs screaming at the thought of this turd achieving ISO blessing. (Ditto for anyone who has ever had to try to use such software in conjunction with some other software a different team developed to the "same" spec.)

Re:I don't get it

This is what happens when academics go head to head with corporations.

The corporations will win every time. As smart as academics are, they just aren't prepared for this kind of thing.