Norway's Yes-To-OOXML Is Formally Protested

An anonymous reader writes "Norway's yes-to-OOXML may tip the vote in favor of accepting it as an ISO-standard, but the committee chairman just faxed a formal protest to the ISO. 'I am writing to you in my capacity as Chairman (of 13 years standing) of the Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. I wish to inform you of serious irregularities in connection with the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Office Open XML) and to lodge a formal protest. You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot. This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway's vote from No with comments to Yes.'"

Comments

Re:Nice Sentiment

[Chirs]

The point of an ISO standard is that multiple organizations can implement it.

In this case only Microsoft can possibly implement it, because various sections refer to proprietary MS software and basically say "do it like that".

Since only Microsoft knows what that actually means, nobody else can implement it. Therefore it is worthless as a "standard".

Re:Nice Sentiment

[SanityInAnarchy]

Of course. ISO has tons of standards that we don't all use all the time. In the same way that the ISO C standard doesn't require everyone to program in C, an OOXML standard won't force anyone to use OOXML. What matters is whether or not a large number of people stand behind a standard and request that others follow it.

It also matters when governments start imposing standards-compliance on themselves. For a brief moment, we had hoped that we'd be able to get government documents in a reasonably standard format (ODF) -- that is, I think, why this is actually a big deal.

Usually there's an existing implementation that gets to call most of the shots...

I'd argue that's actually a good thing, if and only if said implementation is at least as free/open as the standard itself. No spec can capture every single quirk of a real live piece of software, and in case we discover two alternate implementations which both fit the spec, it would be nice to be able to say which is correct.

That's not originally my idea, but I can't remember where I heard it first.

But for large parts of the spec to basically say "Whatever MS Office does" -- or, actually, "Whatever a particular piece of extinct proprietary software does" -- that seems pretty unacceptable in a spec which is meant to define the now and future standard, rather than simply document (partially) what a particular implementation is going to do anyway.