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Ecma Receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Standards
Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft's Office Open XML document format attracted 3,522 comments from the national standards bodies that participated last summer in balloting that has so far derailed the effort to certify the format as an ISO standard.
Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week. Ecma International is a Swiss standards body that already ratified Open XML and is guiding the format through the ISO.
According to Jones many of the 3,500-plus comments, consisting mainly of objections and suggested changes to Ecma's standards proposal, overlap with one another. "When you group them into similar buckets, it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list," he said. Still, he apparently acknowledged that the number of comments was "still pretty impressive."
Open XML just missed out on a fast-track to approval as an ISO standard in the initial balloting that concluded in early September. Ecma's proposal won a majority of the votes that were cast but not enough to meet the requirements for approval.
Ecma has until January 14 to provide responses and rebuttals to the comments submitted by the national standards bodies. The issues raised will then be debated at a so-called ballot resolution meeting that ISO will hold starting February 25, after which the various national standards bodies will have a chance to amend their vote — the last chance for Open XML to be approved."
>Ecma International is a Swiss standards body
The E stands for European
European Computer Manufacturers Association, which is in Geneva, CH
Many of the common criticisms of Open XML involve internal inconsistencies and breaks from traditional/standard formats (wikipedia). These include currency formats, language issues, etc. Not all of the problems have simple fixes, and for such a complex standard, it may take a lot of work to iron out the issues.
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
And how many of that "majority" were only there to vote in support of the open XML proprietary format but in reality have no interest what so ever in standards? Some honesty here would be refreshing considering the suspicion of corruption.
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.17/iso-procedures
"a leaked memo showed that Microsoft asked partners to influence the vote but had also offered to pay them to do so"
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/05/133219&from=rss
"It turns out there's an interesting correlation between Transparency International's 'corruption perceptions index' and voting behavior in ISO's OOXML decision. Countries with a lower score (more corruption) on the 2006 CPI were more likely to vote in favor of OOXML"
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=7E36CE19-D223-45C2-9704-A2F4B116AA26
"the publication of the voting results brings to a close a hard-fought and often bitter battle to win the approval of national voting bodies that has been tarnished by allegations of corruption, bribery vote stuffing"
*sigh* pathetic
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
According to this Groklaw article there were 10,000+ comments.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070910110639612
Where does that leave the 6,500 missing comments?
From the end of the article:
>...the last chance for Open XML to be approved."
Shouldn't this be "...the last chance for Open XML to be approved through the fast track method.". It can then still take the normal, but quite longer and time consuming way .
Not that my opinion matters, but I think a lot of really talented people are wasting their time getting pulled between OOXML and ODF.
I have been involved in some standardization efforts, and from what I can tell -- that's exactly the point.
In many standardization efforts there are participants whose sole purpose is to delay, confuse, or break the standard, or at least wear the active proponents down. Typically in these cases these disruptive participants are trying to protect their own product or implementation -- sometimes they are just playing for time to catch up to competitors in their R&D department, sometimes they are trying to water the standard down so that their proprietary solution would be more successful.
It's not very hard to see which would be the case in this instance.
Lately, governments tend to notice the problem of "lock-in" formats and demand open standards for government use (remember the Massachussets affair?). Once that attitude becomes mandatory policy, Microsoft has to do one of the following:
;-)
-support ODF or another standard not controlled by them
-drop out of government business
-or have their own format promoted to a standard
Guess what they are trying now?
C - the footgun of programming languages
Microsoft can't really change OOXML at all. This is a primary reason for their wanting it fast tracked to ISO acceptance.
Why can't they fix it? They've already shipped Ofice 2007, and that is built to suport OOXML as is.
As a result, their ISO efforts are likely screwed, or if not, any document format they do get through will be kept around for its status, but left all but unused. Probably support for it will appear in an office service pack that they will say is aimed at the civil service or some other crap.
The real goal of switching to an open, implementable (which rules out OOXML...) standard is to open up the market for software which can edit/display it.
And generate it too. This is something that is possibly not understood by ordinary users of word processing software, but it is a tremendous advantage to have the possibility to generate real documents from (a) database(s) and other data sources.
The groklaw article is referring to the comments from the ISO committee members, the ECMA is a different standards body covering Europe.
I'm not supporting Microsoft (I'm a dyed-in-the-wool *nixer), but you're confusing the two bodies.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
The article is talking about documents sent to ECMA by ISO.
But, maybe ISO did condense them a bit.
Rethinking email