Jeremy Allison On Microsoft, OOXML and Standards

An anonymous reader writes "OOXML is already Microsoft's "de facto" standard as implemented in Office 2007, so when would any changes arising from the Comments Resolution meeting in February 2008 be put in place? According to Jeremy Allison's latest column, when last minute changes were suggested for the CIFS standard, which Samba exists to disentangle, "the response came back from Microsoft that although the fixes were valid, unfortunately the code was already written and was going to be shipped in the next service pack. End of discussion. It wasn't even in a shipping product yet, but the specification was determined to be unchangeable as they didn't want to change their existing code.""

Comments

Re:Where does that leave the standardization proce

[jkrise]

isn't it that in order for a file format to be accepted as an ISO standard there has to be at least a couple of independent working implementations?

Actually I thought so too myself, but apparently this is forbidden by the ISO! However the spec itself must be complete, self-contained and authoritative... this bit I am quoting from a related link from a Groklaw article, in the comments section of Mr. Alex Brown's blog:
http://www.adjb.net/comments.php?y=07&m=09&entry=entry070909-104641
and the Groklaw article is here:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070910110639612

The relevant answer:

ISO rules forbid reference implementations. The thinking is that the text must itself by complete, self-contained, and authoritative; a reference implementation opens the possibility of deviation from the text, thereby creating uncertainty about which is "right".

That said, in SC34, we follow the practice of informally requiring that our "home-grown" standards (RELAX NG, NVDL, Schematron etc) are proved efficiently implementable during standardisation. If my time wasn't so taken up with DIS 29500 I would be working on an implementation of DTLL in Java to accompany the draft standard, for example!

Re:Where does that leave the standardization proce

[marcosdumay]

Requiring implementations is different from requiring "reference implementations". Since their network standard, ISO changed its procedures to encourage people to ask for functional implementations (from different vendors) of the standards they create.

But a reference implementation is "do it like Office 2007". ISO doesn't accept that, the specification should be on a document, not a software.