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ISO Approves OOXML

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looks-like-no-joke dept.

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.

4 of 435 comments (clear)

  1. Do they not know their own rules? by Adaptux · · Score: 5, Informative
    While I still have some doubts regarding the genuineness of this document (for example, why does it purport to come from the ISO Central Secretariat rather than from the ISO/IEC "Information Technology Task Force" (ITTF) which has been managing the voting process?), the document seems to accurately reflect the previously available information regarding the voting decisions of the national standardization bodies.

    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).

  2. Re:pyhrric by holloway · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. Re:I need enlightenment... by WWWWolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    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, or implications of it being ISO-ed...

    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.

  4. Re:Weirdest April 1st Ever! by the_olo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Could there be some sort of challenge or appeal coming?

    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.