Microsoft XML Fast-Tracked Despite Complaints

Lars Skovlund writes "Groklaw reports that the Microsoft Office XML standard is being put on the fast track in ISO despite the detailed complaints from national standards bodies. The move seems to be the decision of one person, Lisa Rachjel, secretariat of the ISO Joint Technical Committee, according to a comment made by her."

Comments

Re:hmm

[mollymoo]

MS's XML should be marked and tagged as standard ASAP -- that way, when Office 2010 rolls around, OpenOffice 3.0 can simply say "we put out docs according to MS's standard. If it doesn't work, it's THEIR fault."

The problem with Microsoft's "standard" is that in many places it says things like "do what Word 5.0.3 does in when in double-line-spaced mode" without saying just what that means. The specification for Microsoft's XML format is not in the standards documents, it exists in only one place - the source code for Microsoft Word. Making a fully compliant implementation of Microsoft's XML format when you haven't got access to the Word codebase is therefore virtually impossible.

You won't get what you want from MS Office XML

[twitter]

I'd rather have a published standard for microsoft interoperation via XML file formats then the old .doc & .xsl files.

This too seems to be the M$ party line - the magic of XML is better than their old secret formats. It's bogus, of course, because their new XML is as poorly defined as any of their formats. If M$ was interested in interoperability, they would use ODF and make a converter using their knowledge of their crusty old standards. It's an impossible task because their old "standards" were contradictory to begin with. At the end of the day, the old formats are doomed to well deserved neglect, and there's no reason M$ could not just publish everything about them and let their former users translate things for themselves.

There's so much double talk around this issue, it's not even funny.