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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."
And the ECMA modded most of the 3522 comments between +1 and +3 interesting.
Not that my opinion matters, but I think a lot of really talented people are wasting their time getting pulled between OOXML and ODF. Right from Jody Goldberg and a lot of others are spending a lot of time supporting both (and debating why).
And looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that - quoted from Jdub's email to gnome-lists.
I've already shouted down MooXML, but I think I'm done talking about this, if I'm not going to do anything in particular (say, does the Koffice ODF guys need some help?).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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
Perhaps someone can submit it to the Guiness World Records folks? There can't have been too many other standards with as many (or more) comments. It may not end up being a standard, but with a bit of help it can be a really good joke.
Who wants to bet that MS will resubmit the exact same thing without changing a comma, while pretending it addressed all the comments?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
"Open XML" is that kind of like "Open VMS"? (The funniest oxymoron there ever was...)
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
What happened to that story about how MS had signed up so many voting members to ISO that no quorum could be reached?
I suppose they will crawl out of the woodwork for this vote but one would think there would have to be other votes in the lead up.
evil is as evil does
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
No you had it wrong. It's Ecma Computer Manufacturers Association.
Seriously:
It acquired its name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organization's international reach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecma_International
Also, IE refused to render the list in anything but quirks mode, thus making everything off by random numbers of pixels.
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 .
So they should be allowed to force a hack as an open standard upon the rest of us, who couldn't really care less about how MS plans to eat what they've been cooking over the last 12-15 years? Enough is sometimes enough.
May I ask, what happened to your original /. ID?
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
Stating that "Open XML JUST missed out on a fast-track to approval" is wildly misleading.
More accurate would be "After extensive rigging of the fast track voting process, Open XML STILL failed to gain enough votes to progress into fast track voting".
What Microsoft did to the ISO voting process has damaged this standards setting institute in both credibility and functionality (and has quite nicely identified those participants who can not be trusted to remain with technical merits only, like what happened in Switzerland). The side effects of their ISO vote rigging are still felt because there are now issues with other, non-Microsoft related standards that grind to a halt as the wannabee voters (i.e. the MS paid crowd) are simply not interested or involved in the day-to-day running.
Personally, I think those late members ought to be banned for life from ever going near the process again, but so should be anything introduced by Microsoft if you want to do it right.
It seems anything MS touches turns to lead nowadays, and HP has finally started to reveal the truth about those 'great, "on track" sales of Vista': Yet Another Myth.
Surely Redmond must be able to see the light at some point? It's all good and well running after the innovation train and pick things up later, but it gets difficult when that train accelerates and you're not on board..
Open XML just missed out on a fast-track to approval as an ISO standard The correct name is Office Open XML or OOXML.
The standard format "Extensible Markup Language" otherwise known as XML, is already "open" and has absolutely nothing to do with XML itself (other than using that particular format for wrapping up its data/contet).
Why is that important? Because Microsoft has a (successful) strategy of sucking up general terms like "XML" and turning them into their own. If the world starts calling their new document format "Open XML" it won't be long before all non-IT people think that XML is either something out of Redmond, or that Microsoft made it "open". This has happened before, and Microsoft are really good at it. My boss and perhaps 80% of our customers insist that an "SQL Server" is a Microsoft product, and they falsely connect "SQL" with something from Microsoft. And I often meet young students (age 16-19) who think Microsoft invented the TCP/IP network protocol, only because Windows calls the protocol "Microsoft TCP/IP" in the Windows operating system.
I am not a Microsoft-flamer. In fact, I work with development of Microsoft-based IT systems. But I still object to the degradation/transformation of general terms or standards, which falsely make them sound like they are from Microsoft.
In short: The new document standard from Microsoft, used by Microsoft Office, is named "Office Open XML", and there is no such thing as "Open XML". The Extensible Markup Language, XML, is published by W3C and is already "open".
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...