OOXML's 662 Resolutions

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."

Comments

I like the country count.

[sethawoolley]

Note the number of comments submitted by the smaller countries that have taken up open source efforts. Colombia, Venezuela, etc.

Goes to show a few people CAN make a difference.

I believe I speak for most of us..

[RuBLed]

That means you, Slashdot.

We don't RTFA much more those 662 files.

- but

We could comment on it now if you wish...
We would download it anyway to archive the world's internet and determine the melting point of silicon in your everyday datacenter...

Re:I believe I speak for most of us..

[rpp3po]

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.

Bill's 662 responses

[Rebelgecko]

Bill Gates actually had several more responses, but they forgot to upload 4 of the pdfs.

Re:Bill's 662 responses

[HerbieStone]

> Bill Gates actually had several more responses, but they forgot to upload 4 of the pdfs.

640 should be enough evil for anyone. ;)

obligitory anti-MS line....

[theheadlessrabbit]

662 Resolutions ought to be enough for anybody.

Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:slashdotted

[RLiegh]

Indeed. 640 Resolutions should be enough for anyone.

662 responses?

[rachit]

Where are the other four?

Open

[clarkn0va]

From Rob Weir's blog:

Yes, the comments and the resolutions to the comments are on two different web sites with two different passwords

Bravo. How proud then is Ecma of these 662 resolutions? Remember, kids, the "O" in OOXML stands for "Open".

db

sorry about the slashdotting

[dominux]

just woke up to find the server not responding, checked slashdot whilst starting to fix it . . . OH SHIT, now I know why it is down! I will try to keep it up.

Interesting 'resolution'.... still confusing!

[jkrise]

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!

Re:Interesting 'resolution'.... still confusing!

[Anonymous Coward]

In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards...

I think Microsoft should rename its text encoding as Windows Text Format... or WTF! Everyone can undesrtand exactly what WTF means, without any ambiguity! Hell.. even rename OOXML as WTFML, no need to look it up on Wikpedia to understand!

Any suggestions to slashdotproof it?

[dominux]

the site is a Wordpress blog on Apache and MySQL with Debian as the operating system. It is on a fairly well occupied server, it is actually running in a xen virtual machine. It has loads of bandwidth available, it is in a big datacentre in London. At the moment I can't SSH into the box, I am doing a reboot from the xen admin console (just saw it switch to runlevel 0 - it is running still, but very very slowly.) What settings should I tweak to help it stay up under the impressive load of a slashdot effect? I am going to get more of the host resources allocated to it later (more RAM for a start) but I am not sure what else I can do. I might turn off some of the logging (although I would like to see the logs for today).

Re:This means a lot...

[jkrise]

This means a lot...especially coming from a full-time salaried employee of International Business Machines,

So what? Don't you think an open dialogue between competitors is much better than shady backroom dealings that screw the customer?

who by cosmic coincidence recently released a product that uses ODF and competes (or tries to compete) Microsoft Office.

ODF was the first to be recognised as an ISO standard, it's MS that's trying to compete and catch up... and making a very bad attempt of it, besides.

I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.

If it's FUD, why not expose it by refuting any opinions in the article. Not every corporate-sponsored research is FUD... not every company is Microsoft! Maybe you are a full-time paid shill for them?

whilst the server is rebooting, a small correction

[dominux]

on the site at the moment are the 3492 (ECMA say there are 3522, not sure where the extra ones came from) comments from the .zip file of .doc files of the country comments. About 750 or so (I would tell you exactly if I could see my site) have been classified. I think in my inbox there is a mail with a leak of the 622 responses, I would tell you for certain if my email server hadn't just been slashdotted. I will identify the 622 comments as soon as I can and we can all laugh at them together. I think the general format is "we agree . . . blah blah blah . . . we are not going to do anything about it"

Re:Hrmph.

[mattbee]

Customer's ISP here - just loaning this chap's virtual machine some more memory to deal with the hoardes. Ah there, it's back up again and using no swap, hooray. Apache might be hitting its MaxClients limit as well, I'll keep an eye on it :)

...It kind of does.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Sometimes, you don't have to consider the source.

2+2 is always 4. You may disagree with everything I stand for; you may think I represent evil incarnate, or that I'm just lazy hippie scum; but if I say "2+2=4", you kind of have to agree with me.

So, unless you're actually going to dispute the fact that:

• There are 662 separate PDFs
• The comments and the resolutions to the comments are on completely separate pages
• The whole thing is password-protected

Unless there's something factually wrong with that, pretty much anyone can independently figure out that the process sucks giant donkey balls.

Very interesting amendment, from USA no less!!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Would have sworn it is a comment on a slashdot thread! Way to go Alan Bell!! 3 cheers.
- - - - - -
US - 270

Naming DIS 29500: The current name of DIS 29500, Office Open XML is seriously misleading in several respects. First, it is not a document format based on XML but rather an XML representation of a legacy document format with particular processing semantics. Second, reference should not be made to commercial products and clearly "Office" in the title of this proposal is meant as a reference to Microsoft Office. Lastly, the proposal is no more or less open than any other ISO proposal and so "Open" is meaningless in this context.

It is suggested that a new name be chosen for the proposal that reflects its goal of representing and continuing a legacy document format as represented in XML. Such a name should not carry an implied reference to a Microsoft product nor should it use the term "open." One possible name would be: Legacy Document Formats Represented in XML. The principles developed from this effort might well prove effective for other legacy document formats that should be represented in XML.

DIS 29500