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ISO Approves OOXML
sTeF writes in, with the hope that this is an April Fools joke. Doesn't look like it though. An article up at Intellectual Property Watch claims they have obtained a document (PDF) enumerating the vote after Microsoft's OOXML won ISO standard status.
However, how valid are those votes? For example, the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives seem to pretty explicitly forbid changing the vote from "disapprove" to "abstain" like AFNOR (the French standardization organization) did (under the influence of heavy lobbying from Microsoft and HP).
LOL. You clearly have no understanding of the ISO. They're responsible for thousands of standards in a wide variety of industries. Even if people ignored their computer-related standards, few would notice. The ISO is mostly known for their manufacturing process and quality control standards.
I agree. We're back to where we were a year ago only now with a lot more awareness of the office monopoly and how much money is wasted.
Here are two reports on OOXML that I recently released, one (PDF, 0.9MB) and two (PDF, 0.8MB).
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Microsoft buys ISO certification; World looks on with drool on its face
So it's the same old story about reverse engineering Microsoft Office, not implementing a poorly defined inconsistent "standard".
They didn't anyway - ISO are the jokers that gave us the ridiculously baroque and unused 7-layer network model that many a 90s undergrad was made learn by rote. ISO are the ones that decimalised "megabyte" (arguably correctly - but came up with the ridiculous-sounding "mebi" alternative. ISO have always been of dubious relevance in the computing industry (until Microsoft bought them too, ECMA were much more relevant). The real relevant force in computing is the IETF. Now, that standards process still works, despite microsoft's active involvement.
From user's point of view, this rushed standardisation means that the whole point of the standardisation has been defeated in OOXML's case. It also means that we now have two standards that solve the exact same problem, and thanks to the Marketing, the technically far worse format has a chance at winning: If OOXML becomes the dominant format, the promising future from OpenDocument may not be realised. It can be a major setback.
And what was the point of the standardisation? What was the golden promise of OpenDocument? Interoperability, plain and simple.
Simply put: In the current state of affairs, OpenDocument is implementable by third parties. OOXML is not. There can and will be many OpenDocument applications. If OOXML won't get fixed, there will be one and only one application with anywhere near compliant OOXML support.
With OpenDocument, you can edit the documents in any ODF-compliant application - or process them with any external tool, or generate them from scratch programmatically - and there's no problems because the standards is complete, well specified, and not hopelessly tied to one application. OOXML, in comparison, has nothing of this: There's a bunch of nasty features that make writing completely compliant applications difficult, if not impossible. The end result will be that there's one application that processes OOXML "perfectly" (MSOffice) and the rest work when they work (and since consumers expect perfect behaviour, it means they aren't used very much, no?)...
Sure, the interoperability dream is still very much there, because ODF is still out there. It's just that now we have a completely redundant standard that is a) technically inferior but b) Microsoft will make you either use it, or cry and use it.
Approval was not won, approval was purchased.
Sorry, but every article I read about OOXML is about the voting and standardization irregularities, and nothing I've found reviews OOXML from the users standpoint...
That's pretty much because:
a) the voting irregularities are IMMENSE
and
b) there is no review on OOXML from the user's standpoint, because there is NO implementation (ZIP, ZERO, NONE) of the ISO candidate version of OOXML to review. Not even from Microsoft, who are using a different version now, and (IIRC) have stated that they WILL NOT be using the ISO version in the future, if it is approved. AND it is likely that there will never be a complete 3rd party implementation of the ISO OOXML standard because it is so long, complex and dependent on patents and references to legacy closed source software. MS happens to own that source and those patents and aren't about to give them away. So basically it's a dead end mockery of the ISO process.
If that's not enough to answer your questions AND piss you off, do some more reading on the topic.
Try reading up on how and for what the Fast-track process has been used in the past: Mature, complete and currently implemented industry standards that are just being formalized; Not slap-dick, fly-by-night, throw-in-kitchen-sink 6000 page cluster-f*ks like OOXML.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Presumably because they thought this might happen. OpenOffice already supports pretty much every format under the sun, so deliberately ignoring OOXML would be obvious, petty, and somewhat self-destructive.
.docx file that comes from outside), then it's better to have OOo support it competently than require an extension that does it poorly.
It would be a lock-in tactic, and open-source software isn't really capable of that: If there was demand for OOXML import/export, and Sun didn't implement it, someone else would write an extension for it anyway (or worse, fork the whole project). If organizations are going to ask for OOXML support (if only to handle the stray
In the first ISO vote the members had 50 pages of complaints
around 1.5% of them have been adressed in the meantime
what non-bribed ISO member would say now "wow, they adressed so many complaints that I can go from a 'no' vote to a 'yes' vote"?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Took about 15 minutes for the full .NET SDK to install for me. Must be a problem with Virtual PC. A good chunk of .NET's installation time comes from prepopulating the assembly cache. Basically it's compiling to native code ahead of time, something Java doesn't do. Considering the way JIT technology works, I'm not sure .NET is really achieving a win either, but there you have it.
Of course the only sensible way to judge a framework is by its install time, right? Or by insinuating that it comes from furriners?
Read it and weep.
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123
Pathetic, if you ask me.
I seem to remember there were no votes against it, and 1 abstention... The actual number of countries voting was much smaller too, as microsoft hadn't stuffed the system with easily bought countries by that point.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
- The ISO members (the JTC1 committee) found 3522 defects in the OOXML standard
- The Ecma grouped these complaints and proposed 1027 changes on about 2300 pages
- Microsoft said they had adressed 662 of the proposals
- At the isos ballot resolution meeting (BRM) 900 of the 1027 proposals were not checked (they didn't check if MS had implemented the changes)
- Rob Weir used a random sampling technique to estimate how many proposals were actually implemented: about 1.5%
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9065903&intsrc=news_listhttp://www.pro-linux.de/news/2008/12520.html (german)
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/0310208
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/03/how-many-defects-remain-in-ooxml.html
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I don't mean to sound like format correctness Nazi, but your PDFs could be much, much smaller.
You just need to substitute the Nimbus family of fonts (which are in Type 1 format) for some corresponding TTF fonts, like the FreeSans/FreeSerif families.
The problem is that OpenOffice PDF exported currently cannot do subsetting for Type 1 fonts, only for TTF fonts. So it embeds the full Type 1 fonts (Nimbus in your case) in the file. All the characters, including unused ones, like Japanese, Hindi and Chinese glyphs!
That's why your PDFs are almost 1 megabyte when in fact they could be twice as small.
Look in the properties of your PDFs (or use pdffonts utility) - when your see font names like "DAAAAA+font_name" then it's good - they are subsetted.
But font names that aren't prefixed with those "?AAAAA+" strings are embedded fully, without subsetting - they occupy lots of space!
Eliminate those fonts from your document when exporting to PDF, until OpenOffice issue 46305 is resolved (not likely in the near future...).
According to ISO press release , "Subject to there being no formal appeals from ISO/IEC national bodies in the next two months, the International Standard will accordingly proceed to publication". So there's still 2 months for appeals from NB's.
>>And by real motives I mean "Anti-Microsoft people dont want Microsoft to obtain a public international standard on documents, so Office sinks (and Microsoft gets screwed) when governments start pushing restrictions on formats for their documents".
Absolute 100% pure unadulterated crap. Msft is entirely capable, and welcome, to use ODF. In fact, I think plug-ins already exist.
I am sick to death of this brazen lie being propagated on slashdot, and elsewhere. It is not true, and it makes no sense. You statement is based on the assumption that ODF locks msft out - and that assumption is simply not true.
ODF is already approved as an ISO standard.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.