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What Happens Next on the US Vote on OOXML
Andy Updegrove writes "As you may know, V1, the INCITS Technical Committee that had charge of the US vote on Microsoft's OOXML, failed to reach consensus on either approving or disapproving the specification. As expected, Microsoft has turned to the full INCITS Executive Board in an effort to salvage the situation. Between now and Labor Day, a complicated series of fall-back ballots and meetings has been scheduled to see whether the Executive Board can agree to approve or disapprove OOXML, in either case "with comments." A vote to approve would mean that addressing the comments would not be required for the US vote to stand, while a vote to disapprove would hold the possibility of US approval if the comments are satisfactorily addressed. The bottom line is that a vote to approve (either in the US or in many other nations around the world) does not appear likely, due to the sheer number of technical issues that have been raised with OOXML, and the expedited schedule upon which Microsoft has insisted throughout the process."
Interesting, although unsurprising, to see Apple following the money here.
A dead concept.
Big difference. If it's the International Standards Organisation that's voting; it should not be subject to the machinations of the company that submits the standard under scrutiny.
According to the earlier article, V1 and INCITS were both extensions of the ISO evaluation process. Not just a US agency.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Is there anything we can do to get this thrown out the window for being a horrible standard as it should have originally?
Thought it might be Open Office XML but found out that it means
"Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) formats"
Thought others might want to know.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting OOXML to go away.
I know government is dog-ass slow, so I am not terribly up in arms, but agreeing to some open standard for government documents (not controlled by MS, but not necessarily ODF) is obviously the best choice for archival storage, transparency, and maintainability.
Well it was a messy spec, with big holes, a single backer and a vague 'IP' claim hanging over it.
The only thing they're voting on is whether they are a credible organization or not. Whatever happens with this spec, it will still be only implemented by Microsoft and use only by noobs who use Microsoft products without thinking. So it makes scat difference to the real world.
If they're smart they'll boot it out and gain a bit of cred.
Show Me The Money!
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
I prefer choice. Having an ODF standard should not exclude an OOXML standard. With both standards published, it is possible then for developers to include support for each. Just like good syndicated news readers have the ability to handle both ATOM and RSS x.x.
In the end, its about choice. With standared, published formats it is possible. Or, would you rather the MS Office document standard to remain closed? (Perhaps that is what those whose goal in life is to bitch endlessy about MS want?)
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Is it possible to implement with relative ease into ODF, all the features that Microsoft sees lacking in ODF? If possible, Microsoft should help in this effort and then standardize on ODF or tell us the disadvantages of using ODF together with all features that Microsoft wants.
The impossibility here is not that ODF is incapable of rendering MS Office content properly; if MS wanted that to happen, it WOULD. (MS, after all, is in the best position of anyone to map their proprietary stuff to ODF and vice versa).
No, the problem here is NOT technical, it's ideological. The feature that Microsoft wants is user lock-in. The essential feature for MS is that THEY control the standard document format, and exclude all others from adequately rendering that format, keeping essentially all users as a captive market. This is more than adequately demonstrated by an objective examination of MS' public comments, their corporate conduct during this debate, and their private intentions as evidenced by the Halloween memos. For that matter, simply look at their corporate conduct over their whole history, and ask if it's ever changed for the better.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
We have two open standards. The Microsoft (a big company) open standard is setup to be backwards compatible with all the weird crap imposed by their prior formats (which makes sense, since documents tend to be stored in these formats), whereas as ODF is completely new format pushed by another massive software company... Sun (and sometimes IBM, another friendly open source lollipop factory).
What does this have to do with anything? Last I checked, OpenOffice can save in xml and Microsoft Word can save in ODF (with a plugin). This is like a cock-flexing match between the FSF and Microsoft and it's basically irrelevant to 99.99% of users and government employees.
If ODF, as it stands, were released by Microsoft and called Microsoft ODF, we'd have the same level of FSF, GNU, etc pushback.
Isn't mainstream software development about adaptation and matching and supporting standards- not massive legal battles for complete control?
You don't put something in a specification and not define how it works. It has no place in the specification. That's the whole point.
So here we have Microsoft working backwards. They take what they did and try to create a specification for it instead of creating a specification and then programming to it. Then they leave out parts of what is actually done in Office '07 so that other parties can never be compliant with the "specification". That would be akin to the TCP specification saying that bit 2 in byte 14 is a flag that says the checksum should be calculated like Windows 95 does it, without specifying how that is. This is just ridiculous. Do you not understand that some documents (probably all docs imported from Word 95 which I know is in the spec, I'm not sure about Word 97) WILL use this tag, and therefore anyone trying to comply with this specification will not be able to make the documents appear as they will in Office 2007? When importing a document from Word 95 or 97, Office 2007 should convert it completely to values defined in the specification, there should be no need for these tags for "backward compatibility".
If the specification has no way to make the spacing look the same, I would say that it is an incomplete specification (although it is 700+ pages). If there are certain quirks of Word 95 and Word 97 that would make the specification hard to understand, it doesn't matter. They should be defined exactly anyway so that ANYONE implementing the specification (and only the specification) will be able to produce documents that look the same.
I've used M$ word, and corel, star office, and OO pretty extensively, even taught courses in M$ Office certification, and other that just making documents an eyesore, I still see a reason we can't just use RTF... Course me sending in resumes in RTF might also explain why I can't get a decent job...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
A "standard" means one, not several -- especially when they don't interoperate with each other.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Watch this situation closely, and if you can put your hand into the process to make sure that it flows properly, I'd suggest that you consider doing just that.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Wrapping "Weird crap" up in tags does not make it implementable by anyone and therefore cannot be called a standard.
6 7823890231521654325378643
6 7823890231521654325378643
explain the difference if you can!
Microsoft Word 95 - This is weird crap
&*56&*(65876&%^%$£^%*)623870^"378^"65536523675232
Microsoft Office Open XML - Proprietary tags they call a an open standard
&*56&*(65876&%^%$£^%*)623870^"378^"65536523675232
Open Document Format
Stand up anyone who doesn't understand this!
The lines above are using my proprietary encryption/format to state the text in the last example.
Now your task is to write "The fat brown cat sat on the mat!" in the formats from above.
rgds
From other articles I've read on this, it's both. Specifically, this is the national vote that determines how the US rep @ ISO votes. At the int'l level, each national vote has the same weight.
/would/ be able to pull it off, but as it is, it's looking really really tough for them, at least this round. I don't think anyone expected that, on either side.
Obviously, the US isn't the only nation going thru this at this time. MS has been attempting to stack the deck (typically, a working group with half a dozen or a dozen voting members, suddenly has 50 MS partners pay the couple grand to join and vote in the 6 weeks before the national vote), but perhaps surprisingly, even with that sort of stacking, they've been losing votes. Often, they do get the majority, but because this is supposed to be a consensus standard, it requires a 2/3 vote. Several nations have already voted no at the national level, while I believe two had voted yes (in the story I read), and some of those "no"s aren't yet written in stone -- as in the US, MS is playing tricks with the process, adding votes not originally in the scheduled process, etc.
Still, due to the effect of MS' money and the pull they have on their partners to stack the deck, it's really surprising they're having the trouble they are. I'm sure it is to them too, or they'd not have been so insistent on the super-expedited schedule. They are used to getting their way, buying it, skirting the law if necessary, bribing it, whatever, and it's actually surprising them that the whole world isn't simply rolling over for them any more!
The thing is, however, their effort has at least two strikes against it, in addition to the raw politics. One, ODF has already been voted in as a standard, and many of the comments are to the effect that two standards on virtually the same thing will only confuse the situation. They say MS should work to improve and update the existing standard instead, if it's so bad. Two, the MS effort is simply very poor standards material, technically. Many behaviors are defined in terms of how (proprietary) product X did it with version Y (handle wrapping like Word95 did in case Z, etc.). Defining a behavior by reference to a second behavior that itself isn't defined, simply doesn't work well in terms of a standard that everyone is supposed to be able to implement and have all versions interoperable with the standard conformant files written by other implementations. What's interesting, and must be givng MS fits, is that even after they've stacked the deck like they are doing, they're still having a tough time of it, in part because once these partners actually study the thing, enough of them decide it's bad enough they can't vote to approve it as currently speced out regardless. If MS hadn't been so insistent on expediting the process, there's a fair chance enough of these things could be worked out that MS
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the vote at the international level must be, only that the individual nations need a 2/3 vote, and that all nations' votes count equally at the international level.
Duncan
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman