de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard"

you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"

Comments

Good morning, people.

[Anonymous Coward]

The developers had a conference on the Brain Slug Planet. Miguel liked it so much he decided to stay of his own free will.

ROXXXX-annne

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to put on that Silverlight...

Is Miguel speaking as a Microsoft officer?

[overshoot]

Downloading from Novell comes with a Microsoft patent license?

I'm sorry, Miguel, but this is getting weirder and weirder. You may be a sierra-hotel coder, but I'm not sure that translates into authority to make legal commitments on behalf of Microsoft.

Re:Is Miguel speaking as a Microsoft officer?

[raddan]

It should be added that de Icaza is a Novell VP. So in light of the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement, I think we should all take his opinions with a dose of skepticism. That's not to disparage in any way his work in Free software, of which there are many and great, and I thank him for this. But that does not exonerate him from future badness and/or idiocy.

Riiiiiiiiight....

[UncleTogie]

' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), it's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'

I'll think about getting it from Novell....as soon as MS hands over the list of "patent violations". IMHO, this is just a try to make the "If it's Novell/MS, it's legal" line of shite more palatable.

If you're going to try to feed us a crap sandwich, do NOT tell us it's filet mignon.

Nope

[christurkel]

Little things like this in the spec make it less than superb:

Table like Word95

Only Microsoft has that information. No one else can implement this "superb" standard like MS can.

Re:Nope

[un1xl0ser]

The fact that Microsoft has their legacy blobs all over the OOXML that they write is exactly why I don't like it. They don't seem to want to implement it in an open fashion. They just want to fein like they are being open so that all of the goverment agencies and corporations that are concerned about vendor lock-in are given a warm fuzzy feeling.

So yeah, the standard is shit. Nobody can implement it the way that the creator can, by the creator's very design. It is defective by design, as the nutty FSF people like to say.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

I've developed in both formats, and ODF uses consistent naming conventions and builds upon existing standards whereas OOXML is exceedingly inconsistent (google: "sz" node) and it comes with a lot of new standards.

The implications of this are that OOXML is considerably more expensive to implement because there aren't a lot of components to choose from (eg, compare the number of SVG serializers to DrawingML serializers). Building upon existing standards is a very important part of a good standard, I think (and so do the ISO)

Don't take my word for it though, both files are ZIPs of XML* so google for some files and see which one makes sense to you :)

[*] although it's recently been discovered that OOXML refers to OLE objects which are undocumented in OOXML and in Office '07 these are stored as binaries :( ODF and OOo have their own problems of course, but nothing complex like this.

Re:Nope

[DaleGlass]

That's clever. Did you miss the part of the standard where that sort of thing is required for backwards compatibility? Apparently only Microsoft
cares about that sort of thing, so that's why it's in the damn standard.

That's the completely wrong way to specify it. A "standard" that says things like "tables like Word 95" is worthless, just what's that supposed to mean anyway? If you want to standarize a method of brewing coffee you don't say things like "The way Bill Gates makes it", you specify the exact procedure to be followed. If the behavior can't be fully determined based on the standard, then it's crap.

Things like that shouldn't be in the standard in the first place. If you're opening a Word95 document and saving in another, then to preserve the formatting you don't say it's "like in Word95", you specify the list of attributes to achieve the same effect: padding, alignment, margins, etc.

Re:Nope

[IWannaBeAnAC]

The problem is that OOXML defines a bunch of tags for 'backwards compatibility', but doesn't define what they do. To say that 'ODF fanboys and FSF-sponsored trolls don't care about that sort of thing' is insulting. Lots of people, including FSF members, have spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to reverse-engineer Microsoft binary formats. A document specifying this behavior would be universally welcomed, by both the FSF and 'ODF fanboys', because it would then be possible to write high-fidelity converters between old MS formats and ODF (or from MS binary formats to a non-legacy subset of OOXML, for that matter).

Having a bunch of tags with no definition as to what they do is not an ingredient of a good standard. If you wanted to define a bunch of custom tags, it could just as easily be done as an extension to ODF, which, if it was well-defined, ISO and the open source community would surely have no problem with. Having a international standard where significant parts of it are 'depreciated', is itself rather bizarre. If the backwards-compatibility binary-format tags are depreciated, why include them in the international standard?

Re:Nope

[MMC Monster]

But if it can be ignored, will the document lay out the same in two different products? If layout is different, why have you gained?

Re:Nope

[Yaztromo]

(it is an optional tag that can be ignored).

Not if Microsoft keeps using it you can't.

Sure, you can ignore it if it comes up in a document, but if a user with little care or knowledge about such issues loads a document up that uses such a tag in (for example) OOo and their table doesn't look like it did in Word, they're probably going to think that OOo is at fault, and may make a decision to not use the alternative software in the future (or may go around telling everyone they know that said software sucks).

If Microsoft, the developer of the main product which generates these data files continues to use these tags, they become impossible to ignore without introducing rendering issues which will be sufficient to annoy potential users of alternative software.

Yes, purportedly these tags are only supposed to be used by Microsoft when converting documents in older Word formats -- but how many hundreds of millions of such documents exist out there? Quite a few, which seems to guarantee that these "ignorable" tags are going to occur quite frequently, and will impose sufficient differences on document rendering if they are ignored. So unless these optional tags are fully documented, why should anyone outside of Microsoft want to adopt this standard?

Standards aren't often perfect the first time around, but someone at Microsoft should have realized this, and should have prevented themselves from trying to fast-track this standard. The biggest problem is that there is the appearance that Microsoft was trying to pull a fast-one on the international standardization community with an incomplete, and highly imperfect standard that they wanted to rush to fruition for purely competitive (and not technical) reasons. With time and revision, OOXML may indeed be a fine standard, but as it stood at the point where they tried to ram it through the ISO, it had (and has) serious flaws.

In one of your other posts to this thread, you mention:

Am personally proud that Jody and Michael made Microsoft add ~650 pages or so to the spec that documented the formulas (one of the things we struggled a lot with in the Gnumeric days).

Here you admit that you've already seen first hand how incomplete standards can affect Open Source (and really any third-party) development. You had a problem with the lack of documentation, and pressured MS for more details to get your software working correctly. So why is it that you have an issue when others want to pressure MS into either rectifying other areas lacking proper documentation, or removing them from the standard altogether, in areas that matter to them?

Yaz.

Re:Nope

[Yaztromo]

Yaz, you wrote an essay and ignored the part where I said that ECMA was going to document that for the next batch of issues to resolve in the spec.

I didn't ignore it at all. I'm glad this is something that the EMCA is eventually going to resolve. My comment is solely as to why it's important that it is documented, and why your statement that "it's optional" is hardly a solution. It may be optional, but it's important to implement to give users the expected level of interoperability, and this is why many people have expressed concerns about the standard as Microsoft has originally submitted it.

So they know about the issue, they will write the docs for it, and integrate it into the doc.

So basically "Your bug is being going to be fixed". Next issue.

I think you and I can agree that the standardization organizations are doing a good job of ensuring that the standard is itself up-to-standard. But I can't subscribe to your opinion that nobody has any right to complain about the standard as it was submitted by Microsoft, just because it will (hopefully) eventually be fixed. I can appreciate that these faults will be fixed, but that doesn't mean that I (or anyone else) have no right to comment on its current state.

In addition to the above I predict it does not matter, because its a legacy setting and they are themselves trying to not drag documents that contain that.

So they say, and for now, but I've been a Microsoft watcher for more than long enough to say that I'll believe it when I see it. And "trying not to" doesn't mean "won't" -- I'd be significantly happier if Microsoft were to say "we won't use these legacy tags ever", and then kept their word (forever -- in which case they would be unnecessary to have in the standard, as I imagine nobody else is going to need to use them if MS itself isn't going to use them).

Yaz.

Re:Nope

[VGPowerlord]

And why do you care if they are there? Do you figure the evil Microsoft will have some tricksies up their sleeves because of these tags? What part of the phrase "ignore them if you don't care about backwards compatibility" do you fail to grok?

If a major Office competitor implemented OOXML but ignored the backwards compatibility parts, Microsoft would be sure to use those when saving OOXML files in MSOffice just to make sure they don't look right in the competitor's office suite. Which part of that did you fail to grok?

Re:Nope

[bentcd]

A "standard" that says things like "tables like Word 95" is worthless, just what's that supposed to mean anyway? I have been wondering why the standard is so mind-boggingly long. Why can't it just say "Do OOXML the way Microsoft does it" and be done with it? Seems such a waste to write 6,000 pages (or whatever) when you can say the same thing in seven words.

There is good in him!

[Andrei D]

-But, why must you confront him?
-Because, there is good in him. I've felt it. He won't turn us over to the Emperor. I can save him. I can turn him back to the good side. I have to try.

Does this guy have any credibility left?

[AuMatar]

First Mono. Now he wants us to download stuff from a specific vendor to get patent protection. And finally he thinks a standard that has hundreds of pages of backward compatibility modes for 10 year old apps is a good standard? Is there anyone not ignoring him completely yet?

Re:Does this guy have any credibility left?

[Joey Vegetables]

I'm sorry, and I do not mean to detract from his significant accomplishments, but I have to agree that this episode speaks poorly to Mr. de Icaza's credibility. The deficiencies of OOXML are severe, well-known, and unfixable. Not only is it not a "superb standard," but it is not something that could correctly be described as a "standard" at all, because no one, including Microsoft, could implement it correctly, and no one including Microsoft even claims to be able to do so. ODF, for whatever problems it might have, is implemented by and/or for all major office suites, including (via a third-party plugin) Microsoft's own, and it is a published ISO and IEC standard.

I don't know whether Mr. de Icaza simply cannot see this, has chosen not to see this, or has not really bothered to seriously examine it before making such an authoritative pronouncement. But any of these problems speaks poorly to his credibility, and bodes poorly for his continued status as a spokesperson for the free software community. My advice to him would be to continue to write great code, but try to refrain from public comment about things he for whatever reason clearly does not understand.

Re:First things first.

[nuzak]

It's his own blog.

It's not too surprising

[Analog]

Miguel has been fascinated with Microsoft since long before he started writing Gnome, and that fascination shows no signs of having waned. Unfortunately, while it allows him to see the good things MS has done in a clearer way than many of those in the free software world, it also tends to give him a bit of a blind spot where some of their deficiencies are concerned.

Is there an opposite to FUD?

[gilesjuk]

Maybe the opposite is Uninformed Praise and Optimism (UPO).

It seems he hasn't read about how you can "look but not touch" when it comes to the internal data. An expert in the Office format recently proved you could modify the xml in the new Office formats but Office would complain and not load it.

The fact that it's XML seems to only benefit the world in one way, it compresses nicer.

Always been a MS Shill

[plasticsquirrel]

I wonder how much Microsoft paid Miguel to say this.

You're obviously new here. He's been praising Microsoft for years, every chance he gets. Pretty sad, really.

Re:Always been a MS Shill

[jmorris42]

> He's been praising Microsoft for years, every chance he gets.

Not only that, he has yet to encounter a Microsoft technology he didn't like so much he wanted to clone it into the Free Software world and make us all dependent on it.

For years the joke was GNOME was cloned Microsoft internals with a goofy (vaguely MAc inspired treat the user as an idiot motif but without the consistency or polish of the Mac UI to make up for it) UI while KDE was cloned Microsoft UI with goofy Trolltech internals. Then Miguel hell head over heels in love with .NET and was all setto rewrite GNOME using that patenttrap. Thankfully saner heads have prevailed.... so far.

The sooner we all write off Miguel and Novell the better off we will all be. Taking any code from that camp is just inviting a lawsuit. Sooner or later, BOOM!

Re:Always been a MS Shill

[smittyoneeach]

I dunno. I figure Miguel is a smart fellow who is managing to do well for himself and support free software simultaneously.
When the time and market is right, Redmond will push a .Net-ified version of MS Office, with obscured assemblies the run fine on Mono.
Project vomit while you may, if it keeps gives Redmond life beyond Vesta, then Miguel may be doing us all a little favor.

Re:Always been a MS Shill

[ajs]

> He's been praising Microsoft for years, every chance he gets.

Not only that, he has yet to encounter a Microsoft technology he didn't like so much he wanted to clone it into the Free Software world and make us all dependent on it. ... Taking any code from that camp is just inviting a lawsuit. Sooner or later, BOOM! All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard. It's probably been in the works for quite some time before we ever heard about it, and Microsoft does employ some of the brightest minds in software. The problem is that Microsoft's grubby hands at the wheel of a standard for file format will mean that their "reference implementation" (Office) will embody a set of defacto addenda to the standard, and no one will be able to produce a truly compatible implementation.

That leaves us not far from where we are today.

Re:Always been a MS Shill

[aichpvee]

Quick, someone go tell miguel! Microsoft just released Microsoft Jumping Off a Bridge 1.0! He'd better go copy it before they get too big of a head start.

Re:Always been a MS Shill

[UnknowingFool]

All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard.

In theory, OOXML is not a bad standard. In implementation, MS has chosen to tie OOXML to Microsoft products as close as possible. Two major criticism brought out by those who have reviewed it are that (in a standard) OOXML must replicate MS idiosyncracies to work (Spreadsheets must replicate an MS Excel date bug for dates function to work properly), and MS has chosen to write subcomponents from scratch using MS technologies instead of already accepted standards (relying on MS Math standards instead of Math XML).

Read his latest comment . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . here before starting a flamefest.

I'll paste it here to make sure those averse to clicking on links can read it too (anonymously even so you don't say I'm karma whoring):

Hello,

On 9/10/07, martin.schlan...@gmail.com wrote:

> On 6 Sep., 07:37, "Miguel de Icaza" wrote:
> > OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been
> > FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that
> > there is something fundamentally wrong with it. This is at a time when
> > OOXML as a spec is in much better shape than any other spec on that
> > space.

> Michael Meeks didn't seem to think so at FOSDEM 2007.

That is odd. Michael and I have discussed this topic extensively. He certainly would like clarification in various areas and more details in some. But Michael's criticism (or for that matter, the Novell OpenOffice team working with that spec) seems to be incredibly different than the laundry list of issues that pass as technical reviews in sites like Groklaw.

The difference is that the Novell-based criticism is based on actually trying to implement the spec. Not reading the spec for the sake of finding holes that can be used in a political battle.

Finally, Michael sounded incredibly positive after the ECMA meeting last month when all of their technical questions were either answered or added to the batch of things to review. I know you are going to say "The spec is not owned by ECMA", well, currently the working group that will review the ISO comments is at ECMA.

For another view at OOXML look at what Jody Goldberg (no longer a Novell employee) has to say about OOXML and ODF from the perspective of implementing both:

http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/

I find it hilarious that the majority (not all) of the criticism for OOXML comes from people that do not have to write any code that interacts with OOXML. Those that know do not seem to mind (except those whose personal business is at risk because Microsoft moved away from a binary format to an
XML format, which I also find hilarious).

> >Will I have to suffer
> > > the shadow of Microsoft patents over Silverlight when using or
> > > developing Moonlight?

> > Not as long as you get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include
> > patent
> > coverage.

> You're saying two things here that really shock me. Please tell me I
> misunderstood.

1) You're saying that people _will_ have patent problems - i.e.

> Moonlight "infringes" MS patents and doesn't work around them. Even
> though Novell promised never to ship code that infringes MS patents -
> but always avoid them one way or another.

First of all, am not aware of such Novell promise to "never ship code that infringes MS patents". You can not make such statement because for one, the patent system is broken. Novell statements are wildly different, they are of the form "we do not believe that we infringe" and am sure they say something along the lines of "we dont plan on infringing, and we plan on removing infringing code". But I am not aware of all the promises Novell has made, and I can not comment on other parts of the organization. If you want an official answer, my personal blog on politics and poor attempts at humor is not the place to get an official answer. Contact Novell public relations for that.

But you might be referring to the policy that we use for Mono, and I will be happy to discuss those with you. The policies are on our FAQ, so you might want to read that before you post in panic again.

Moonlight does not have the same policy that Mono does in terms of us working around to remove infringing c

Re:Miguel's just doing what's best for himself...

[Duhavid]

Everyone has brown zune, unless they are having intestinal difficulties.

What damage has he done?

[jcr]

Use his stuff or don't. It's not like all the coding talent in the world is being exhausted on his projects. I have no interest in .NET or Mono, and what's it to you if other people do?

-jcr

It's a wonderful spec

[overshoot]

Well, I suppose there's room for opinion on that. For instance, Jim Mason seems to think it's a long way from prime time, just as a specification.

Now, to put this in perspective: Jim Mason (of Oak Ridge National Laboratory) isn't on one side or the other, but has been doing document-format specifications for a looooong time -- he was, I believe, the founding chair of SC34 and had a hand in the creation of SGML. The dude knows documents, he knows standards, and when he writes

the submitters obviously did not read -- and edit -- this submission into a consistent whole. If it were coming through the normal ISO process, I'd say it was in the state of a Working Draft and not yet ready for registration as a Committee Draft and assignment of a number

I'm inclined to take his word for it than Miguel's.

This is just getting downright indecent.

[bersl2]

Some reasons why OOXML is unacceptable:

OOXML is wholly un-XML-ish.

It doesn't re-use existing ISO and W3C standards, whose behaviors have already been publicly vetted.

Its licensing is still quite unacceptable, especially in its lack of clarity.

Look, Miguel, I know you love MS and all, and I guess I can at least partially tolerate that, but keep the fellatio behind closed doors, OK? :P

RTFL - Submitter is a Jackass

[DreadSpoon]

Read the fucking link, instead of ripping on the guy for selectively chosen comments without their supporting context and explanation.

(a) He says OOXML is great not because the specification itself is a work of engineering genius, but because out in the Real World is easier to implement than ODF. That might not be for a good reason (OOXML is similar to existing World formats in structure, and so existing code is easily modified to use it, where ODF requires an entirely new approach and so is far harder to add to existing software), but it's certainly a different story than Miguel just blindly loving the OOXML spec.

(b) The patent protection claim is exactly what it sounds like, except for the fact that there are NO known parents which Moonlight or Mono infringe. It's a simple of matter of, "if something comes up, we won't sue your customers." Those same companies (Microsoft and the MPEGLA group) are still totally free to sue the developers and companies behind FFMPEG, Linux, GNOME, KDE, Apache, X.org, OpenOffice.org, etc. Nothing about the protection Novell offers will increase the risk of those lawsuits - all it does is decrease the risk for people who download from them. It's a nice gesture that some suit-wearing types give a fuck about, and the rest of us are free to ignore just like we ignore the patent minefield for every other project, all of which are guaranteed to be infringing _something_.

(c) The article submitter is a sensationalist jackass.

OOXML.

[miguel]

Folks,

I made that comment on my blog because that reflects my personal opinion. You really need to obsess over something else.

And before someone brings up the Microsoft connection, you should know that Novell official policy is to actively endorse ODF and that Novell's position on OOXML is neutral. My employer does not engage in any advocacy for or against OOXML (but folks in engineering work on OOXML support for OO.org).

My opinions are my own, they do not represents the views of my employer.

Now, speaking purely personally.

I consider OOXML to be a pretty good standard all things considered, as I said back in January or February I did not agree with a lot of the criticism that was aimed at OOXML. The quality of the critique was not very high, and it so far has consisted of throwing as much mud as possible and waiting to see what sticks, and what sticks repeat it a thousand times.

If these critiques were aimed at Linux or open source, we would be justly up in arms about the criticism being sloppy and having very little to stand on. I went into some detail back in January:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html

Some of my opinions are based on the work that I did in Gnumeric many years ago.

Before there was any agreements between Microsoft and Novell, I was part of ECMA and when Microsoft initiated the OOXML specification process, it was me that got Novell's OpenOffice.org hackers to attend the meetings. At the time my goal was to extract as much information as possible from Microsoft because of the history we had with Gnumeric.

Michael Meeks and Jody Goldberg were some of the guys that went and attended the ECMA meetings. From all the issues that were presented to ECMA, Novell was the second issue raiser (behind Microsoft's own QA of the spec), and it was all largely thanks to Jody's diligent review of the spec. From all the issues raised to date, on the latest status report only one issue had not been addressed (118 or 180, I can not recall anymore). Am personally proud that Jody and Michael made Microsoft add ~650 pages or so to the spec that documented the formulas (one of the things we struggled a lot with in the Gnumeric days). And all of this happened before the Novell/Microsoft agreement. Our interest at the time was: lets get the most information we can get out of this spec to be able to interop.

So from that standpoint, I think that the folks at ECMA have done a pretty good job of addressing the issues raised by those that were implementing it.

The specification can be criticized on various levels, from critical issues, to mild issues, and in a way the distributed effort to stop OOXML helped debug the spec and raise the issues that need to be clarified.

There is certainly a number of critical issues that must be addressed, and it seems from every comment that Brian makes on his blog, that ECMA and Microsoft are committed to resolving those issues. I would not have noticed them, so in that regard the anti-OOXML camp has done a great job in terms of finding problems in the spec.

But the majority of the criticism falls in other categories:

mild, but conflated by a pedantic outrage over it ranging from OH MY GOD THEY USE A BITFIELD THAT IS JUST SO-NOT-XML (am using caps to encapsulate the outrage in an actual discussion when an acquaintance of mine lost it)

misinformed (Stephane Rodriguez shotting himself in the foot and asking "why does it bleed?", his document is making the rounds, and I have debunked it here: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279895&cid=20363627 and someone else on CodeProject or in Slashdot had to explain to him with sticks and balls his mistakes).

misrepresentation, like people claim that you must obtain a license from Microsoft to implement OOXML, that is simply not

Re:OOXML.

[suv4x4]

Yes, he said this: "ODF's model of 'chartness' didn't fit well with Gnumeric. In contrast XLSX may be ugly, but it''s concepts were very familiar from XLS. We already had much of the code required to handle it."

He didn't say it's a great standard. He said it's a great spec upon XLS serialization in XML, and hence it's easier for him to port XLS importer to XLSX importer. Is anyone even arguing about this here? If there is I never saw him/her.

May I entertain the possibility you have difficulty understanding the fundamental difference between good spec, and a good standard?

This, and comments like "OH MY GOD THEY USE A BITFIELD THAT IS JUST SO-NOT-XML (am using caps to encapsulate the outrage in an actual discussion when an acquaintance of mine lost it)" doesn't help your position stand up.

When you publish your opinion, people read this opinion and you get feedback on it. If you were an average Joe, probably no one would care. You're not however, this is why people like you should put more thought into what they put out in the public than you did, and then now whine that someone "obsesses" over it.

Re:OOXML.

[suv4x4]

So there you have it, a mouthful of personal opinions. I bet you wanted to spend your time doing something else, like making out with your girlfriend (haha, just kidding, if you actually reading my opinion on OOXML you have no girlfriend to make out with).

Ladies and gentlemen, the Novell Vice President...

Re:OOXML.

[stilborne]

> but we have to support them both *anyways*, so its not like its a big deal.

Holy mackerel.

First: I really don't care to get into a pissing match about the deficiencies of OOXML as a possible standard (they are legion and often fundamental; and whether or not you understand that and/or choose to minimize the severity of these things changes nothing). I will say that I'm very happy to finally see at least *some* open documentation for the new Microsoft Office format; that has to make things easier for the people implementing filters. As such I am completely unsurprised that those people are happier than they were a couple years ago. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't. That part is probably something you and I agree on =)

However the quote above is utterly shocking. Let me explain what I mean:

You are right that we have to support both OOXML and ODF out of practicality. But you know what? That sucks. It would be best for everyone if there was only one format to support. Nobody would lose in that scenario, except perhaps the owners of companies with business models that depend on format variance to sell their product.

In the case of document format storage, a standard is truly important because formats (poor or not) that eventually lose implementations over time carve out blank spaces in our history once we can't read them properly. These same formats are also the source of certain information inequalities in society (e.g. those who can't obtain an implementation for financial, social or political reasons). This may not matter so much for Acme Inc's quarterly reports but it sure does for government, health and other socially vital information. Remember when some hurricane Katrina victims couldn't use the FEMA website because they had slightly older computers? This isn't a made up boogyman, this is stuff that bites us as a society fairly regularly. Now imagine a hundred years from now when we can still read the constitutions of our countries, research papers, poetry and other examples of human kind's great literary works that are hundreds or even thousands of years old ... but can't read the documents we're creating at the start of the 21st century. How will we learn from our history if we can't study it fully?

Getting proprietary formats out of the way as soon as possible so that we do not extend this mess any further than necessary is absolutely the responsible thing to do in light of our (hopeful) future.

By allowing OOXML to pass from "specification" to "international standard" would be doing exactly that: extending the problem as it will give years if not decades more life to the format. If OOXML was rationally implementable and properly documented, it wouldn't be as big of an issue. It would be, as you put it, simply suboptimal. The fact of the matter is that OOXML is not rationally implementable and not properly documented. That's why it lost the recent vote; it wasn't because of lobbying (and trying to imply that when Microsoft got its hand caught in the cookie jar is pretty ballsy, by the way). Are some interests acting out of concerns for their business models or pet projects when they rally for ODF and against OOXML? I'm sure they are; but that alone isn't reason to dismiss the fact that OOXML is problematic and that we don't need two standards (any more than it is to dismiss OOXML just because it comes from Microsoft).

So please, admire OOXML for what it is: a step forward in documenting what historically has been one of the more pernicious sets of file formats we've had to deal with; but don't mistake that for being a reason to make it an international standard which will only prolong the issues that are part and parcel of the Microsoft Office formats, even in this current version of the specification.

I know that having a bunch of people shit on you in public sucks major donkey nuts and certainly would put most rational people into a rather ungracious mood, but please think above that noise and consider with your intell

Re:OOXML.

[jmv]

I can explain the date situation to you if you want. It is a bit complicated and most people have no idea of why this is decision is important.

I personally do not care enough on that one, just thinking that it's bit stupid that ISO would be saying "here's how you handle dates" and later say "but in a text document, you actually do it differently".

As for SVG, I do understand the frustration around it, but for the longest time those "in the known" were pretty unhappy with the direction that SVG took.

SVG may have its flaws, but at least it was agreed on by different people/orgs. Again, I don't see the point in redefining a new standard (on which nobody except MS has any input) within a new text document standard.

I should add that Math people dislike MathML anyways, and they would much rather use TeX.

I have no opinion on MathML anyway (and do use LaTeX for 99% of what I write, OO.o for the rest), but again if ISO bothers creating a standard for something, it should at least make use of it.

I agree that we have a last resort with ODF "Look it up in OpenOffice", but if "look it up" is good enough, does that not defeat the purpose of documenting ODF in the first place? The idea of a standard was so others could interop without having to sort through 8 to 9 million lines of code. And your average guy that was to generate some ODF or OOXML will not really have the skills to read through all that C++. My guess is that most people would write a file in either OOo or MSO save the file and open it up in an editor to see what the thing looks like and generate with a bunch of print statements what they want. To this crowd "get the source" is probably not very useful.

I agree that even ODF should define everything in the document instead of having it in the code. That being said, the information still exists in a form that is publicly accessible. Any person with enough time and skills can implement those app-specific features. That is not the case with OOXML. MS can (and does) hide the format and the only hope to know how it works is reverse-engineering. This is much harder (and prone to legal trouble depending on how you do it) than looking at the OO.o source code. And *even* if you manage to reverse engineer the format to a point where it works flawlessly with 100% of the files you've seen (unlikely), you're still left with two problems:

1) You'll never know for sure your converter works on strange files you may not have seen (thus opening up to FUD of the kind "do you really *trust* this app with your legal documents")
2) For backward compatibility reasons, it is common to first include features only in the "decoder" for a format and then only support them later on the "encoder" side. That means that there are certain features that could be already in there, but that you will never actually see in a file (i.e. can't reverse engineer) until a new version of MS Office decides to actually generate files that use it.

Overall, it's really the "read the MS Office source code and you'll get it right" that makes OOXML completely unacceptable for me. And it would still be unacceptable no matter how beautiful the other parts are. A standard that nobody except one company has any chance of supporting perfectly is just not a standard. It's a proprietary format that pretends to be open.

You have chosen to introduce a new topic: should it become a standard? And should it be a rubber-stamp standard? Well, I do not know the answers to that. In fact, am of the opinion that most standards in the "big boys" space are tools to club your opponent ("ISO standard: check!").

It's unfortunately becoming a bit of that but it doesn't have to be. I believe most of the IETF and W3C standards are fine with that respect. Same for ISO actually. And personally, I won't mind if the "big boys" club their opponents by using open standards. I do mind if they introduce pseudo-standards that leave enough unknown to make sure they're the only ones being able to actually implement the thing.

This is the end of my respect for Miguel

[IWannaBeAnAC]

I have been following the OOXML saga fairly closely; from Rob Weir's blog, to the NO-OOXML site (admitedly that is a rather partisan site, but I've found the technical arguments presented there generally to be both verifiable and compelling), and the Standards Blog, by Andy Updegrove who seems to know his stuff (which is bizarre since he is also a lawyer, but I guess he came from a parallel universe). I've also looked at sections of the spec myself, and I agree with the major technical criticisms; aside from being redundant in that there is already an ISO standard that could -- with well defined extensions -- cover everything Microsoft wants to include (ie, the backwards compatibility stuff), the OOXML document is a poorly worded draft of a 'standard' that is incomplete, inconsistent, and not ready for standardization.

By usual ISO standards (if it hadn't been submitted on the fast-track), it would be at the stage of a 'committee draft', with at least a couple of years of serious effort into working it into something useable. This is the process that ODF, along with most other ISO standards, went though, and if OOXML makes it through without a similar amount of scrutiny, ISO will have egg on their faces.

For Miguel to say it is a 'superb standard' means he either hasn't read it or followed the technical discussions (in which case he deserves the panning he will get for making such a clueless statement), or he really has sold out, in which case he deserves exile.

Even if it *was* a good standard...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if we thought that it was a good standard--you know, something that would not contain ugly hacks like formatLikeWord95, would not need a major international company to brib^W cajole hundreds of Microsoft Certified Gold Partners to join NB's that are members of the ISO to get it passed--how does all that backwards compatibility hack^W support actually work in practice?

Well, let's take a look at one company's deployment of Office 2007 to 25,000 workstations. Oh, what's that? It's still crap? Figures.

Yes, the information should help people interoperate with Microsoft. But all the parts they're keeping from us are important. They want to control de facto standards and keep all other ISVs at second-tier status without having to make good products.

People would be better off with standards not controlled by any one company. Even if Microsoft were the most benevolent company in the world, there's no excuse for giving another company the power to hold your documents hostage in this day and age. And it's about time that people realized that, especially when Microsoft has intentionally perverted standards like ACPI to harm Linux.

The PDF link above is just for proof. Here's a transcript of the PDF so you don't have to view it unless you don't believe me:

Plaintiff's Exhibit 3020
Comes v. Microsoft

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Weslorinen; Ben Falbi
Cc: Carl Stork (Exchange); Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try to make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

MS-PCA 1389717
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

Gates Deposition Exhibit 32
2/28/02

Re:That statement proves it:

[kjart]

Icaza is a thoroughgoing Microsoft shill.

Yeah, starting with an ad hominem makes me want to take your arguments seriously.

Re:no way it's really him

[miguel]

Actually, I did not give you gconf.

I did not originally like Gconf, but today I think that gconf is pretty cool and I think that there is now an effort to revamp it into something new. I forget its name though, something D-Bus based, I also think that is pretty cool.

Try #2

[AKAImBatman]

(Yes, sorry. I should have used the preview button.)

Jody left Novell some time ago, and today coincidentally he blogged about his opinion on OOXML and ODF, his blog post is very interesting, as he is an independent developer working now only on gnumeric and not in OOo nor being paid by Microsoft (as I know that many of you consider my opinion completely invalid and tainted):

http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/

Yes, very interesting. Jody says: "I did not comment on the quality of the formats. That will come up later."

What did Jody actually say? That OOXML was easier to support because Gnumeric already supported the XLS format. Which does nothing to address the relative merits of having a format like OOXML standardized under the terms with which Microsoft wishes to standardize it.

OH MY GOD THEY USE A BITFIELD THAT IS JUST SO-NOT-XML

Oh my God, they used a bitfield to encapsulate Microsoft-proprietary extensions like VBA rather than standardizing them as well. (Proper capitalization used to represent more somber tone of retort.)

I just do not have the energy or the time to compete with a guy whose full time job is to make sure OOXML is blocked.

That's right. It's Microsoft's job to pay off officials, exert political pressure, and abuse due process to ensure that OOXML is forced into consumer hands before ODF catches hold.

People claimed that 6,000 pages for 4 office applications was to big, but it comes down to 1,500 pages per application. And someone mentioned that removing the examples and changing the font size to use the same font size that the ODF spec uses the spreadsheet (or word processor, I cant remember) spec goes down to 700 pages.

A disingenuous argument at best. The ODF format supports those same four applications, plus a bit more. 1,500 per application is huge in comparison. Even if we assume that it's 700 per application, it's STILL huge when compared to 867 for ALL applications.

That being said, I don't mind long specifications if they are long for a good reason. Being long because ancient cruft is being supported for no real reason is not a "good" reason at all.

ODF is predicated on the ideals of KISS, interoperability, and long-term data storage and retrieval. OOXML is predicated on the concept of converting Microsoft formats to an XML description. While the latter may be a nice goal for Microsoft, it does not conform the the former ideals required for an international standardization effort.

I'm sorry Miguel. I've disagreed with you in the past, but I can't even begin to fathom your position in this matter.

wrong use case

[m2943]

Microsoft's Office XML Standard is clearly bad in a number of respects: unnecessary deviation from established standards, encapsulation of binary formats, and backwards compatibility with obsolete MS Office formats. It does, however, indeed have the advantage that it's easier to import for code that's already been written to import the old binary formats. On the other hand, it's just as clearly harder to process using XML tools.

Now, the question is: are the primary use cases for which we should design an XML office format office suite input/output routine, or are the primary use cases XML processing.

Well, let's see: there are half a dozen office suites around: MS, Gnome, KDE, Apple, and a couple of commercial ones. Each of those needs to implement a reader/writer once. On the other hand, there are thousands of uses and implementors for information extraction and transformation of office documents.

Seems pretty clear to me that we should optimize XML office formats for XML processing, not for the convenience of the implementors of office suites. And that, in a nutshell, is why Microsoft's office format is worse than ODF.

Re:Novell is distributing concealed patent landmin

[pallmall1]

Well, you quoted my posts out of context(I provided a *lot* of context).

I did provide a link to the blog containing the quoted posts. Perhaps you could explain what I got wrong regarding this:

Moonlight does not have the same policy that Mono does in terms of us working around to remove infringing code. For one, we do not know what it could be (that is how the patent system works) and two we have agreed and have obtained permission from any patents that might exist in Moonlight to implement it.

This policy makes any software released under it a patent trap.

Foes of Miguel de Icaza

[Anonymous Coward]

Foes of Miguel de Icaza:

iso (87585)
java (15428)
KDE (100369)

I'm going to have to say that yes, yes it is. Although it may be somewhat sensationalized, the man DOES own a Zune. I repeat, Miguel de Icaza owns a Zune! If that isn't worthy of a pointless Slashdot flamewar, or at least a paddling, I don't know what is.

We need an intervention.

[seebs]

First it was Gnome, an attempt to build a desktop Just Like Windows.

Then it was Mono. We've had slashdot stories on Miguel's pleas for Microsoft to please not constantly break compatibility to push people towards their implementation.

Now this.

Miguel, we care about you very much, and you need to understand that Microsoft doesn't love you. Microsoft will never feel about you the way you feel about Microsoft. Your pure heart is not enough to suddenly make Microsoft embrace any kind of genuine open standard. Microsoft has never had any goal but the ruthless elimination of any possible competition, and all you're doing is enabling the abuse.

You need to stop, and you need to walk away. You need to get into therapy, and start thinking about what's good for you, and what's good for the people who care about you.

Microsoft will never love you. They will not adopt open standards to make you happy. They will not try to make interoperation with you better. They will occasionally say just enough to string you along and make you write thousands of lines of ugly, bloated, crappy code in servile imitation of their unholy crap, but they will never actually care for you.

It's not gonna happen.

Look, face it: Bill Gates appears to be happily married. It was never meant to be. Just move on, and for the love of God, stop shipping multi-megabyte "frameworks".

Again, once more with feeling

[theolein]

Miguel, you seem to feel that you can play words one way one minute, then another way the next. My own personal opinion is that you are losing a lot of credibility with your own personal opinions. There is a very good non technical reason to dislike OOXML, just as there's a very good reason to dislike Mono, and your post that it would be best to download silverlight from Novell's servers to avoid patent hassles simply transfers the undesirability target from Microsoft to Novell, because enforcing users to use Novell software is no better than forcing them to use Microsoft software to avoid legal patent threats from Microsoft itself.

I don't know how many hundreds of people posted here warning you about the dangers of using Mono on Linux, the very FUD patent threat statements that Microsoft actually then later made in order to coax people like you and your bosses into becoming even more enslaved to Microsoft's whims than those who use Windows itself.

You don't seem to see Microsoft is more than likely to use OOXML and Silverlight as clubs to threaten people with later on. That's the real reason why OOXML is dangerous.

Re:That statement proves it:

[gnasher719]

Icaza being a Microsoft shill seams to be the only logical explanation.

Nobody who would create an international standard with the intent that it is actually used by the public would have created a standard covering 6,000 pages. That is just ridiculous.

A "superb" standard would build on existing standards, like using standard XML (which is something you would really expect from something called OpenXML). It wouldn't introduce bugs in its date handling because some application (Excel) not using that standard has the bugs. If you read the comments from the British committee examining that "standard", it is completely riddled with errors big and small.

Now I wouldn't want to decide whether the problems come from some Microsoft evilness, or from this being a complete rush job (if you compare this to how long development of the C standard or C++ standard takes, where every single line is examined again or again), but this "standard" should never, ever have been put on the ISO fast track. Maybe in a few years time, if Microsoft has had time to fix all the problems.

For those who don't know: Usually introducing an ISO standard is a multi-stage process. The standard is suggested, then comments are collected, problems are fixed, again and again, until eventually the whole thing has the quality and the consensus that is required for an international standard and then it goes to the vote. This proposal has gone on the fast track, which should have been reserved for standards that have passed all the early stages. Like if there had been an industry wide consensus where everyone followed the same document, and then someone has the idea to turn this wide consensus into an official standard. It shouldn't be used for something thrown together quickly.

No, I don't think that Icaza could call this a "superb" standard unless he was paid to do it. Not that I blame him; I would do the same thing if you gave me enough money. This post here is my unpaid-for opinion, I'll write another one if anyone comes up with say a five digit number.

Appeal to secret knowlege

[overshoot]

Well, you ignored the part where I mentioned that this was being taken care of.

1. You mentioned that "things" were being taken care of; you did not (in any of your posts here, and I read them all) specify that the scoping was one of them
2. You're pulling the classical "I have secret knowledge that proves that I'm right" rhetorical trick. Point me to the revised spec and we can talk.
3. You've practically proven, all by yourself, that DIS-29500 isn't at the level of committee draft, much less final ISO submission. One of the basic responsibilities of a technical committee (see, for instance, JEDEC JM-21L) is clearly defining the requirements for conformance and clearing legal rights for those requirements. According to you, that hasn't been done and here we are at the ISO final vote stage. ECMA-376 needs to go back to committee until it's actually ready for prime time.

Now you argue about optional, so let me clarify, I meant OOXML "optional" which has a very precise term in the spec. Since we are talking about OOXML I expected you to be familiar with it, I guess you were not familiar with it, but only with the handful of bullet points circulating the intertubes.

As a standards maven, I've read the controlling portions (I'm not planning to implement it, so any controlling language hidden in footnotes missed me. As they should.) I'll point out that "optional" has a predefined meaning in standards literature, much as "scope," "shall," "may," and other words that are no more subject to local redefinition than any other legal term. Apparently, the drafters of ECMA-376 had never done any standards work before (the "Scope" section alone makes that very clear) and ECMA made no effort to correct even the most basic flaws.

The problems with technical details I'll leave to others.

Again, your "most of that has already been fixed by ECMA" is an indictment, not an excuse.