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

No teeth.

[Original Replica]

"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".

no big deal

[eerok]

This is likely just a fast track off a short pier.

Fifteen years late

[HomelessInLaJolla]

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.

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 .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.

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.

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.

Re:hmm

[MoogMan]

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".

The new references the old and is just as bad.

[twitter]

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.

This is to get past the pending laws

[Matt Perry]

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.

Re:This is to get past the pending laws

[gQuigs]

"need to specify that the standard must have an open-source reference implementation"

and that's where Novell comes in, adding MS's stuff to OpenOffice.org.

Re:This is to get past the pending laws

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Much like the POSIX compatibility layer originally in WinNT. Effectively worthless as an implementation, it did allow them to get contracts that required POSIX compliance.

M$ will tell you soon.

[twitter]

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.

Re:How it works

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A blood-covered chair nailed to her front door?

Re:Opera is no better...

[kennygraham]

Opera just fast-tracked their "HTML5" proposal with W3C: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2007 Mar/0019.html

HTML5 doesn't say things like "render like Opera 7 does"

Re:Have you read the ECMA responses?

[grcumb]

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.

That's fine, but it only takes one complaint ('contradiction' in ECMA parlance) to stop the process, and there was one such provided by three separate national bodies. It stated the objection, raised elsewhere in this thread, that elements in the standard such as autoSpaceLikeWord95, which basically state, 'do things like we did in this version of this application', are contradictory to the the very essence of a document standard.

ECMA's response is not at all satisfactory. First, they provide the self-serving argument that they're reproducing the state of the art, then they say that they can throw in any missing details later in the process, then they conclude with a statement that is patently absurd:

As already discussed, the OpenXML committee chose to take a different route in defining document settings. If, however, it is decided that more documentation should be provided on the elements in question, or if the elements should be removed from the standard, that is a more appropriate matter for the 5-month ballot, and is not, in fact, a contradiction.

We can sum this up as 'We accept that nobody has ever done this before, but we don't think that contradicts other standards. Anyway, even if it does, let's just agree to talk about this later.' Ultimately, ECMA is saying, 'Whatever faults may exist, even if they're unprecedented, let's just get on with it. We'll figure things out as we go.' That is hardly what one would expect of any self-respecting standards body.

Re:hmm

[mollymoo]

Isn't that just for use when converting documents from Word 5.0.3 format?

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.