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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."
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
My only question is how much will it cost Microsoft to fix this for themselves? Yeah, mod me down fanboys. But, the reality is this is something Microsoft has done all too often. So have many other companies. This seems to be a huge issue to Microsoft. Maybe they will let it slide for now and spend time building up their bastardized version of open format (truly a closed format) while doing what they can to destroy a truly open format (like they did with so many other standards before), or will they decide to go for the quick kill and buy the standard?
I used to really like Microsoft products. I used to look forward to when they came out with new products. I also used to like Monsanto for their *engineering*. Reality is they both have too much in common. I believe Open Format is far more important than anything else in computing at the moment. The implications for the future and the present are huge. Open Format is truly what is needed to create competition. As long as the documents are interoperable across applications, then the applications will have to compete on best of breed, not best of lock in. And, as a bonus if the formats are open, then the worry of data loss due to format loss or is much lower. How many times I have had to pull something from an archive in the Microsoft world only to find none of the current tools can open a document that old (happens in law and finance). That is one of the reasons everyone I have worked with keeps digital images of their documents. They are still human readable, though it does defeat several of the strengths of digitally stored documents.
What do you all think? Will Microsoft go for the long term takeover or try to force the issue now (and why do you think so)?
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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.
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
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