Massachusetts Likely To Approve OOXML

Ian Lamont writes "The IT department of the state government of Massachusetts has designated Microsoft's Office Open XML as an open document format, along with ODF, plain text, and HTML. It's only a draft policy, but it sets the stage for the format being given an official stamp of approval by state authorities — and weakens earlier Massachusetts support for the Open Document Format. Microsoft got a big boost at the end of 2006 when Ecma approved OOXML, and again this spring when pro-ODF legislation was being defeated or watered down in six states."

Comments

ob

[edittard]

Coming up later, Massachusets negotiates big discount from Microsoft. film at 11.

Re:ob

[smilindog2000]

It's not all about money. A lot of this is about trust. How far do you trust Microsoft with your data? OOXML's biggest drawback is that it's not truely open. I'm glad Microsoft is moving towards openness, but as is often the case in the corporate world, this isn't just some company being nice and giving users what they want. It's a direct attack against the ODF threat. It will likely be very effective, resulting in your having to continue to Trust in Microsoft (TM). Trust the big corporation. Good doggie.

Re:ob

[Narcissus]

When parts of a spec say 'and implement this how Word 95 did it', then it's not really open as it doesn't actually tell you how to implement it...

That's one reason, at least.

Re:ob

[cduffy]

So, there are two arguments I see people use to say OOXML is not open:

Neither of those things concerns me much; I'm a lot more concerned about failure to reuse preexisting standards. Forcing anyone who wants to build a full implementation of OOXML to implement Microsoft's own vector graphics language rather than using one of the many available SVG libraries is unnecessary and excessive. Same thing goes for MathML, XLink, etc. OOXML reinvents the wheel frequently, down to having their own date formatting quirks and names for colors (for which there are also ISO-standardized versions). To be sure, OOXML may still technically be "open" -- but if it's unnecessarily complex for anyone to implement without access to Microsoft's legacy codebase (from which the funky restrictions were cribbed), what's the difference?

Any "standard" which is so clearly developed with ease of implementation by a single vendor in mind has a rather obvious scent of unilaterality to it.

Second, some people are concerned that OOXML allows documents that use proprietary image formats or other elements? I ask you, what moron (l)user in this day and age is going to use a WMF file instead of jpg, bmp, gif, or png when creating a word document?

Is Microsoft's clipart library no longer largely WMF? Even if that's the case, modern OOXML implementations will need to implement these ancient, antiquated formats to be able to read documents which were imported into OOXML from Word 95 (or other versions which *did* use WMF as the primary format for imported documents) -- meaning that backwards compatibility will remain much of the headache it was even before documents were converted into a "standardized format". The right way to convert things is normalization, damnit -- if, rather than simply forcing all implementors of the new format to support all the quirks of the old, the conversion process always normalized out the old quirks (ideally into modern, standards-centric formats for which preexisting implementations are available under a variety of licenses), the standard would be much smaller, more manageable and simpler to implement. As an additional benefit, we wouldn't see things like buffer overflows in the parser code for Microsoft's more obscure, obsolete formats causing security holes (as has happened in recent memory).

Part of the point of having a standard is that anyone should be able to implement it. If the standard incorporates by reference other specifications which are not open standards, then the standard can only be implemented in full by those who have licensed said specifications. Is this not an obvious problem on its face? You say that those creating such documents are "(l)users" -- but most office workers just want to Get The Job Done, and don't care (and shouldn't need to care) what format their clip art library is in.

Re:ob

[TheRaven64]

So building legacy compatibility into a new system is a bad thing? Yes, if you do it like OOXML. The correct way of doing it is to make your format expressive enough to store all of the information that legacy documents contain, and then have a converter which translates the old markup into the new format. Consider the following made-up example:

Word processors generally have default style for headings. Which of these would make more sense in a standard:

• Have an element indicating the outline level, and one indicating the display style to use.
• Have an element saying 'use Word 95 format headings,' one saying 'use WordPerfect 3 format headings' etc.

Implementing a spec using the first is non-trivial. Implementing a spec using the second is almost impossible, unless you happen to already have code for importing documents in those formats. OOXML doesn't do this for heading styles (I don't think it does, anyway), but it does do this in a number of other elements.

In summary, the correct place for legacy support is in the importer, not the format. If you're doing things the OOXML way, you may as well have a couple of bytes reserved at the start of the file with one value reserved for 'this document is in Word 95 format' etc.

Re:ob

[Just Some Guy]

I'd have some sympathy if the name of OpenOffice wasn't specifically chosen to make people think of Microsoft Office.

StarOffice started in 1986. Microsoft Office debuted in 1989.

So, now it has your sympathy?

Microsoft lobbying

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC for obvious reasons...

What many people probably don't know is that Microsoft have been lobbying companies, especially technology partners, to lobby their local standards body to get them to lobby ISO. You receive an email talking about "choice" and why that is important and what OOXML is all about, you also get a handy word document (not in OOXML ironically) which you can fill in, sign and post, or an email template that you can send off to the organisation in question. MS also would like a "quote" from the companies to say that they support "choice" and hence OOXML.

And of course good partners of Microsoft often get cash investment in sales campaigns and go to markets.

Re:Microsoft lobbying

[visualight]

The pertinent question is this: is OOXML an open format?

No. I think openxml is a scam. My unverified assumption is that at present there is no translater that is 100% compatible with any document MS Office might produce with openxml, including Novells. Even if my assumptions are incorrect (I'm convinced they are not), it will still be possible for MS to "extend" openxml later with new shiny features that will effectively keep documents locked in.
I can't imagine that any intelligent human will not realize this. The only explanation for openxml approval by ECMA, ISO, or the State of Massachusetts is corruption and bribery.

Re:can someone explain

[risk one]

Because this is the first crack in the dam of Microsoft's vendor lock-in. If Massachusetts stores and releases all government material in an open format, then Microsoft must support that format, or lose a lot of business. Remember that Massachusetts is the home of MIT, lots of businesses there that care about government regulation. And once a couple businesses in Massachusetts stop using office, it can spread. They email some document to another company across the globe, in ODF, then that company comes into contact with ODF, and it will have to either install separate software for it, or even switch away from office, if Microsoft still refuses to support ODF.

Of course, if they do support ODF, then they lose their vendor lock-in outright. No problem switching to OpenOffice if all your clients have Office, just send your stuff in ODF, and they can open it. Microsoft chose the one way out that would let them have some control, develop their own open standard, and lobby like mad to get everyone to use that instead of ODF. That way, at least they own the standard, and that's what Microsoft's always been after.

ODF is not being dismissed

[eck011219]

and weakens earlier Massachusetts support for the Open Document Format.

It weakens ODF's potential for exclusive adoption in Massachusetts. It would be very unlikely that a state (particularly one as large as Massachusetts) would ever completely refuse to accept documents in a format as soon-to-be-common (like it or not) as OOXML.

Granted if they did it, they'd have a better chance of getting private vendors to use ODF than, say, Montana. But you've got to figure that as OOXML gets slowly adopted, there are going to be a lot of outside vendors (not to mention other states) with whom Massachusetts will have to interact who will make the jump to OOXML. And if you think the conversion from old Word to new Word is rife with peril, the conversion from ODF to OOXML and back would likely cause quite a bit of inefficiency and lost data.

Re:can someone explain

[Ngarrang]

... personally I think it should be approved; once the ECMA and ISO approval is done. You have apparently not read the OOXML standard, or you might think differently on the subject. I have read it. It is has to be one the poorest attempts at a "standard" I have ever seen. It is incredibly complex and obtuse. Go, check it out. Please.

The noOOXML.org petition

[pieterh]

Yes, Microsoft are moving heaven and earth to get OOXML stamped as an ISO standard.

One example: in Italy's technical committee a few weeks back there were 11 organisations. When Microsoft had finished mobilising their partners, there were 70. No surprise that Italy will vote "yes" on the OOXML vote. It is disgraceful; ISO will become a "made in Redmond" rubber-stamping tool that helps Microsoft sell upgrades and kick away ODF.

There is an online petition with 16,000 signatures and a lot more information on the noOOXML.org site.

Everyone who cares about open standards needs to sign this petition.

Re:Why support any lock in?

[kebes]

You seem to be confused as to what the point of a standard is, and what the point of an open standard, specifically, is.

Is it really so ridiculous to say that people should just use whatever standard they feel is best for the task at hand.

Well the whole purpose of a "standard" is to get a group of people using the same rules, so that interoperability and transfer of data becomes much easier. Of course there will always be multiple standards, and different groups may decide that one standard fits their needs better than another. No one is arguing that point.

So you guys are mad that there isnt going to be a law forcing states to be locked into ODF?

Actually the proposed law is that the government should be using an open standard. No one is 'forcing' you (or any person or any company) to use this standard. The purpose of the law is to say that the government has a responsibility to use a standard that is open, so that archiving of data is easier (and can be accessed years later), and so that all citizens have access to the data. This makes sense: the government is an instrument of the people, and all the citizens of a democracy should have easy access to government data (and for all time!).

It's rather disingenuous to say "locked into ODF" since ODF is an open standard which means that anyone can generate their own ODF reader and writer. In fact, every computer on the market right now can basically read ODF (in a primitive way), since any modern OS can extract a zip archive and read the plaintext that is inside. Yes, ODF is really that open! You can read it and work with it with very simple tools. There are also many full office suites that can read/write ODF. So it's hard to see how you can say that the government will be "locked into ODF" when it will be trivial for them to convert the data to other formats, copy the data elsewhere, extract it for other use, automate searching through the data, etc. Where's the lockin?

The point with ODF is that you are not locked in. It is so open that it is very easy to convert your data, using a wide variety of tools (many of them freely available). The same cannot be said for MS's offering... which is why it cannot be legitimately called "open" and is a poor match to the needs of archiving and disseminating government data.