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OOXML's 662 Resolutions

Posted by kdawson on from the sliding-toward-opacity dept.

Rob Isn't Weird writes "Microsoft has finally responded to the resolutions concerning OOXML (or 662 of them at any rate). The only problem? The JTC1 NBs who are deciding OOXML's fate have to download 662 individual PDFs from a slow, password-protected server; and many have had trouble getting the password. Don't misunderstand the ECMA's intent, though: there would have been 662 OOXML files if they had wanted to make it hard for people to read and criticize the responses. Thanks to the Internet, other interested parties have put all 662 resolutions online in a searchable, taggable format and are requesting that everyone interested help examine them. That means you, Slashdot."

3 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdotted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well you're not missing much because the 662 responses are mostly grammatical fixes and the big stuff is yet to come. Read the country comments at iso-vote.com/comments

  2. Interesting 'resolution'.... still confusing! by jkrise · · Score: 5, Informative
    FTA: "The CHAR() function converts an integer into a character. But no character set was defined in the DIS to govern this conversion. Microsoft clarrified tis saying that the function uses the "Macintosh character set"on the Mac and ANSI on all other platforms."

    That means the same soon-to-be-ISO-standard OOXML file can be interpreted differently, depending on the 'platform' in which it is being used / read! Typical Microsoft rubbish.... and AGAIN!

    Also Rob responds to a query: "Even their correction is ambiguous. What is the "MacIntosh Character Set"? There is Mac OS Roman, MacCyrillic, MacIcelandic, Mac Central European, and with OS X we have UTF-8 as the default." Hilarious!

    And again, probing a bit deeper into the ANSI character set for Windows... there's no such thing apparently:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI

    In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards[1]). Most of these are fixed width, though some characters for ideographic languages are variable width. Since these characters are based on a draft of the ISO-8859 series, some of Microsoft's symbols are visually very similar to the ISO symbols, leading many to falsely assume that they are identical. To top it all, quoting from a response:

    One thing to note here is that MS explicitly do not support UTF-8 as an non-UCS2 encoding[1], while most Linux distributions are moving towards putting everything in UTF-8. So it would likely be the case in the near future that Linux and Windows users would not share a common platform character set, even if they spoke the same language. (e.g. Windows English British in Windows-1252, and Linux en_GB.UTF-8) And I thought Vista was the most confusing stuff from Microsoft!
    --
    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
  3. Re:I believe I speak for most of us.. by rpp3po · · Score: 4, Informative

    It does not even load in Microsoft's own Office 2004 for Mac for which they still aren't selling an alternative. Their OOXML converter is a silly joke. Convert an old Word XP HTML to Word 97 (doc) to Wordperfect to Word 95 to RTF and it will still look much better than the laughable output of their converter.