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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."
There are all sorts of ISO standards that people refuse to use in their current form. Not seeing this one as that big of a deal however. I'd rather have a published standard for microsoft interoperation via XML file formats then the old .doc & .xsl files.
Oh yes, "Groklaw SMASH!"
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If people didnt jump on whatever the newest Microsoft software is they wouldnt get away with this sort of thing.
What? You mean that there should be some drawn-out process to keep the most-commonly-used XML format from being standardized?
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."
"despite the detailed complaints from national standards bodies."
So what is the point of these national standards bodies? Standards without a method of enforcement, are called "suggestions".
We are all just people.
This is likely just a fast track off a short pier.
"The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." -- George Bernard Shaw
The industry is fifteen years down the wrong path. We (many of us) tried to warn our nontechnical peers before things came to this point. We tried to express the benefits of a diverse field. We tried to illustrate the merits of alternative technologies. We tried to sing the praises of other operating systems and other companies. The sad fact is that computer technology was wrestled away from the true technologists who invented it and was thrust headlong to the public sector by the businessmen, politicians, stock brokers, and bankers who saw a massive profit potential in it but had no real knowledge or appreciation of the intellectual advancements which created it.
.com bubble, we paid for the infrastructure on which the rest of the internet was built, and we paid for the products, the software, and the services on the consumer end. Where, then, did the profits from the .com bubble go? The profits went into the hands of the same major investment groups who have been carefully profiling and controlling the market for generations--people who, when the .com bubble became the .com bust, shrewdly bought the real estate being sold by the common people seeking to ameliorate their losses (which had been carefully planned by those people who were now buying their real estate at dirt cheap prices). When America began to return to consciousness after the .com blackout we now find that the same real estate which we sold to keep ourselves from bankruptcy is being rented or sold back to us--as condos, apartments, are housing communities--at three, four, ten, even hundreds of times the cost.
Billions of dollars in taxpayer money were funnelled, through government grants, contracts, and subsidies, into social circles and corporations who had demonstrated a willingness to put aside the morals and values of the true scientists in favor of ensuring their own priveleged paychecks, pensions, and long term profit margins. The American taxpayers subsidized the startup of the
The pyramid scheme is so beautiful we could almost cry for joy if we were on the financial winning side of it. As it is we have no choice but to cope with a world where Motorola is relegated to handhelds, HP has partnered with Compaq and become just another x86 retailer, and Microsoft holds a betting majority of the chips when it comes to influencing the direction of software development and globally recognized protocols.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
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.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's kind of like .doc only with obfuscation and litigation clearly called out.
What you fail to realize is the published standard in this case is handcuffed to an arsenal of undocumented licensed components.
From http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
Q: Why doesn't the OSP apply to things that are merely referenced in the specification?
A: It is a common practice that technology licenses focus on the specifics of what is detailed in the specification(s) and exclude what are frequently called "enabling technologies."
Hmmm... So the specification alludes to closed and undocumented "enabling technologies" without specifying them OR licensing them. Same old Microsoft.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
And I'd rather have Microsoft use the already ISO-standardised and widely used ODF standard.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I think you miss the point.
{If|When} "Open XML" gets set as a standard, Microsoft will claim that Office is "standards-based and open". Which, by definition, it would be.
Open Office et. al will implement ODF. It will also implement a partial version of Open XML - as best as it possibly can do, given the vague nature of some of the Open XML implementation points.
Microsoft Office will only implement Open XML.
Now, which format is a consumer to choose? Obviously Open XML. Put simply, we'll be no closer to a real-world, workable word document standard than we are now.
Open Office will say "we tried to implement the standard as best as we could". Normal consumers will hear essentially "Open Office wont open my documents properly".
Well, I suppose a standard could be created based on the documentation from Microsoft. It is hardly an independently-implementable standard, however.
Alternatively, a workable standard that is truely interoperable could be accepted that is not anything Microsoft would implement.
I seriously doubt there is much middle ground between these two positions. Microsoft is after all in a position to just say no.
The real problem is that even with (X)HTML/CSS it is not currently possible to take two different implementations and produce the same printed output from the same source material. This is a far, far simplier standard than anything being discussed as a word processing format, and yet there is no common implementation. I am not even sure there is today an accepted "correct" implementation for printing HTML.
How are we going to have a multi-implementation standard for word processing that produces identical formatted documents? I would say it is clear we are not going to have this. This makes the "standards" process a joke.
If you somehow believe that the "presentation" can be separated from the "content" in important documents, you probably need to have more familiarity with government processes.
What do you mean "as poorly defined"? With the binary formats there was basically no documentation: now we have detailed vendor-supplied documentation of virtually the entire XML format.
As you will note if you follow the previously supplied link, MSOfficeXML references the results of their old binary cruft without further definitions, which is no better than nothing at all.
If they really cared, they would reveal what they already know and quit keeping those old secrets. They don't and all their efforts are just so much PR, aka a big lie. You were lied to before and you are being lied to again.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Seems interesting that the ISO is in a hurry to sanction a standard that is specifically designed to make compliance as difficult as possible.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
The only reason that Microsoft wants this to be a standard is to get past the proposed laws that specify that government documents use an open standard. That's why these proposed laws, like the one recently introduced in California, need to specify that the standard must have an open-source reference implementation.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I know no slashdoter wanted this (too much anti-ms in the air), but think of the bright side.
MS has the market by the balls with the only real competition being the WordPerfect suite...Personally I do not like it, but it is fairly widely used in School in Canada. Anything that allows Word documents to be a bit easier to convert to other formats is a good thing.
True, there is a tag for "Do Line-spacing the way Word version x.y.z used to do it on a Mac" (with no further specification what exactly that was), but if you're just *writing* the files there's a simple solution to that: don't use that tag at all. (it exists only for backwards compatibility anyway, I very much doubt that it's possible to make a new version of Word write that tag if you're starting from a clean new document)
If you need to *read* the stuff though, you're out of luck, because you can bet someone is gonna complain if you're able to correctly read only 99% of all Ms-office documents, despite the documents themselves being the insane ones.
You have pointed out that there are a few, legacy, parts of the specification that aren't defined. What we have for XML is several thousand pages of detailed specifications, compared to close to nothing before. How is that not better?
Soon enough M$ reps will be FUDing it up with the same old noise they've always made about "partial" implementations. All day long, you can hear them say that Open Office is not up to snuff because it does not "properly" translate all of those crusty old formats. Their new XML will be much the same, so it's no better.
If they get an ISO stamp, it will be worse because they can claim some kind of reputability and "openness" that they don't deserve.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
All 6 of the complaints were about technical issues. The 1-month fast track approval is not the correct place to raise those types of issues. The only thing that can keep something from getting fast track approval is an objection that highlights why it conflicts with standard that has already been approved. None of the 6 complaints did this, so it was pushed through.
They can of course, raise the same complaints during the 5 month ballot process, which is the correct time to raise such concerns. Although, 6 out of 100+ is still a fairly small number.
A blood-covered chair nailed to her front door?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
HTML5 doesn't say things like "render like Opera 7 does"
Having read TFA and the PDF of the ECMA responses to the complaints, i can see why they decided to fast-track it, many of the complaints by countries are thoroughly debunked as misunderstandings of the specification. The rest are supposed to be resolved during the 5 month process.
As for TFA, they started out talking about fast-tracking the standard, then went on about totally unrelated and unsubstantiated stories about intimidation.
I may be flamed for it, but i call FUD on the part of Groklaw for this "story", the process is working as intended.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
No, I think he is against the failure to document the expected behavior instead of merely mandating mimicing of legacy applications behavior without specification of what that behavior is.
One would facilitate implementation. One is a barrier to implementation. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, chose the latter, either through incompetence or desire to produce a standard that could not practically be implemented by third parties.
Have you seen any ISO 9001 certificates?
The idea of going ISO is to be able to certify and advertise you compliance.
There is no 97% compliance certificate!
So that Microsoft can go to those governments that have declared that they will only use document formats that ate international standards and say "Look, look, ISO standard" (pointing to Open XML). "Now you can stay with safe Microsoft instead of going for that strange communist OpenOffice.org".
An all-new format that supports backward compatibility with an older and supposedly unrelated format? Are you reading what you're writing?
Backward compatibility shouldn't enter the specification at all. It's the seemingly endless instances of backward compatibility support that has made Microsoft's stuff the resource-sucking pig that it is today. Here, they have an opportunity to divest themselves from all that legacy crap and get neat, fresh and unified. They just keep playing the same endless games they have always played because they worked yesterday.
Part of the intent for the recent data standards movement is to simplify and clarify. Supporting legacy junk shouldn't really be much of a factor at all.
Actually, if Microsoft would have done it right, both loading and writing would be easy. Imagine Microsoft Word 2007 detecting a Mac Word 5.3 document (binary, evidently) that has odd margin handling. Instead of writing a tag "emulate-word-5-3-mac", it would write "margin="-77,3pt"
If you do this, the output and thus target format would just have the clean information for displaying. No "just do as if you are Word on Mac", but "compensate margins -77,3pt". That this was because it was created on a Mac or that the user specified that, has no importance...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Funny, I thought this standard conflicted with the ISO standard for time because it incorrectly treats 1900 as a leap year in spreadsheets.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
I remember awhile ago an employee at Opera pointed out that using html and css would create a much easier to adopt document standard. Since it is well understood and universally used. There are a half dozen html renderer's that could all be used to read content on all platforms.
This has many advantages over everything that is being offered now. A universally viewable open well understood and easily learned document standard? That makes too much sense to go anywhere.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Isn't that just for use when converting documents from Word 5.0.3 format? New documents won't use that tag.
Compare to ODF, where key formatting parameters are left up to the application, so that if you had two completely independent ODF implementations, written just from the "standard", documents produced by one would would probably look quite different when read by the other.
Even funnier that these highly spun articles keep making it to the front page... One might start to believe that the OSS community has a bigger marketing budget than Microsoft does! Oh that's right I forgot, ther is no real OSS community anymore. It's all wrapped up in the whims of IBM, SUN, etc... politics.
Has everyone forgotton that ODF was fast-tracked with no complaint period at all? I'm amazed that something as woefully incomplete and ambiguous as ODF is already a standard and no one seems to give a good rat's ass about that. That fact certainly isn't getting any press that I can see. ODF isn't any more "community designed" than OOXML. It's simply a partialy (and hastily) documented, previously application specific markup that happens to be plain text, released under a perpetually gratis license. It simply enjoys a slight headstart over OOXML.
It's just all about beating MS at any cost (those evil mother F***ers, ruining our geeky free world!). Who gives a F*** about a standard's technical competance or compeating on technical merit? The funniest thing is the "high morals" of ODF. Yet, ODF is just as patented and closed as OOXML. If you dare point out any technical deficiancies in ODF you won't see anyone say, "why you're right, let's fix it!" Nope, all you'll see is some half assed and ignorent attack on OOXML lobbed back over the fence.
I'd love to hate Microsoft as much as the next person, but all I see are well reasoned and technical responses in the face of the tantrums in the ODF preschool.
--
No, it's for use when not bothering to convert documents from Word 5.0.3 properly. If you were really converting a document, you'd implement the behaviour of Word 5.0.3 using the new tags. If Word 5.0.3 in double-line-spacing mode did 1.97x line spacing and added a 0.05 inch extra margin at the bottom of the page, you should code that, not just have flag which says "be like Word 5.0.3". The place for details of legacy file formats like that is in a conversion tool, not the specification.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I found the answer from the reply from ECMA to ISO (here: http://www.computerworld.com/pdfs/Ecma.pdf) very enlightening.
As it turns out OpenOffice has a similar feature the "config:config-item" XML property, and there are a number of these config properties that remain unspecified (from page 14):
The original use of HTML was to create links to rich content, which in the case of CERN would be things like postscript files generated by LaTeX. Postscript has been effectively replaced by PDF files, and LaTeX has been (in)effectively replaced by word processors. The original model is still pretty good, hypertext for linking documents that are written in a markup language that expresses content and document structure and displayed in a portable display format. These are three rather different needs, although I will agree that HTML has become much better as a display language, it still isn't the equal for PDFs for print.
The Opera CTO, Hakon Wium Lie, also stated of OOXML and ODF, 'Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them'. If this was true, why did the KOffice team adopt ODF before it was an ISO standard? Surely they could find more enjoyable coding problems than making KOffice able to read and write OpenOffice.org memory dumps. To me, ODF looks a lot less like a memory dump and a lot more like markup (HTML) than does OOXML.
Think global, act loco
It has taken OpenOffice almost two years since standardization and still they cannot fully support ODF yet and they actually started with a big headstart. You comment suggest that one can just built in ODF support on any an accepetable level for MS Office not realistic. MS Office has even more features and also would have to adapt and or extend on ODF to put al those features in ODF (or they would be accussed of adding a handicapped implementation of ODF). Adding a complex fileformat and fully supporting it is also a very complex and lengty process. By using the plugin support the ODF support can be continuously developed and if in the future the need is there to add ODF support directly in MS office they can reuse that code as I think they released in on an OSS license that does not require implementations to share it's code.
The Wraith http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/
The implication being that committees make better decisions than individuals? Please, be serious!
I think the implication is that individuals are cheaper to persuade, easier to intimidate, or are simply suspect in the first place because they need not consult anyone else about their decisions or reach a consensus, no matter how evil or ill-advised their decisions may be.
I'm not saying that's the case here, I'm saying that's my understanding of the way the summary is phrased.
Of course, it also serves to mark her as a target for the ire of the OSS community. Microsoft collaborator! Boo! Hiss! etc.
Anyway, committees make decisions just as good or bad as an individual would in most cases, they just take much longer to do it. :P