ISO Takes Control Of OOXML

mikkl666 writes "Alex Brown, head of the ISO work group responsible for OOXML, has posted a summary of their latest meeting, and he also comments on the resolutions discussed there. The basic message is that ISO now has 'full responsibility for the standard,' and that several workgroups will be established to work on OOXML. An interesting point here is that 'setting up a maintance[sic] procedure for ODF, and then working on cross-standard initiatives' is one of the explicit goals. On a side note, they also reacted to the very emotional discussion on OOXML by posting an open letter: 'We the undersigned participants ... wish to make it clear that we deplore the personal attacks that have been made ... in recent months. We believe standards debate should always be carried out with respect for all parties, even when they strongly disagree.' As Brown correctly points out, 'This content speaks for itself.' We discussed the approval of OOXML earlier this month."

Comments

What do they expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all the backroom dealing that was involved in getting OOXML standardized, a lot of people are going to be bitter.

Re:What do they expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

That Microsoft needed to stack the deck is all-telling, OOXML is unimplementable, has no place as an approved standard and Microsoft and the NB's full-well know it.

You're attempting to conflate the issue, there is ample evidence of irregularities in the OOXML fast track process without considering the backroom deal. The question why so many NB's did an about face requires further exploration and action, if not a backroom deal then something was responsible and it sure as hell wasn't improvements to the "standard"!

Re:What do they expect?

[Lknight]

It's amusing to see that because of the actions of a single software company, money that could have been spent on something like finding cleaner sources of energy or battling rising food prices, will now be spent on trying to support OOXML.

ODF is a standard, implementable by any third party and independent of the implementor's software. OOXML's inclusion as a 'standard' now also has the effect of influencing ODF's openness via 'cross-standard initiatives'.

The ISO process was abused, clearly. OOXML does not meet the minimum definition of an open standard and that is enough to show the process was abused.

Re:What do they expect?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Despite the bevy of rational explanations, with official bodies denying, often with proof, that no 'backroom dealing' occurred, it's still not enough for people to realise that the ISO process may actually be working fine

Have you actually looked at the OOXML spec? It doesn't matter if "backroom dealing" occurred. If that trainwreck is approved as an ISO standard, then the ISO process is broken. Full stop.

Re:What do they expect?

[Mathinker]

> with official bodies denying, often with proof, that no 'backroom dealing' occurred

Like the Swedish official body?

From http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/31/Sweden-OOXML-vote-invalid_1.html:

The Swedish Standards Institute has declared its recent vote in favor of Microsoft's Office Open XML format invalid. It means that Sweden will probably abstain from an important upcoming international vote on whether to make the format a standard.

The reason given by SIS was not the controversial circumstances surrounding the vote, in which Microsoft was found to have offered companies "incentives" if they voted in favor of OOXML. Instead, SIS cited a technicality, saying proper procedures had not been followed.

SSI more or less admits that MS swayed member companies votes and at the same time claims that was perfectly OK, but there was a technical problem somewhere else (a double vote).

Are the other official bodies you're talking about applying the same "standards" as SSI to their voting procedures? If so, you might be technically correct, but as far as I'm concerned, it still stinks.

Personal Attacks?

[mazarin5]

So is evidence of bribery, corruption, and other underhanded tactics considered personal attacks? It looks like they've decided to go ahead and accept it as a de facto standard; I thought they hadn't finished voting yet.

This open letter assures me though - the $y$tem works.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Doc Ruby]

"Personal attacks" has increasingly been the whine of people trying to cover up actions and speech that they personally did wrong, when the attacks are on those acts and speech, not the "person" themself. It's a perversion of invoking the "ad hominem" fallacy accusation when all they're really entitled to claim is "don't look at me" (because they don't want to be accountable for their actions).

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Antique Geekmeister]

This seems sadly true. It's easy for a group that believes in an ethical standard to be misled by people who pretend to it publicly: it's like a spouse with an abusive partner. They hope for the best, and want the partner to improve and hope that they will, but their support of the partner actually prolongs the abusive relationship.

ISO needs to go to a family shelter, change their address, get a restraining order, and make sure that Microsoft's visitation rights with the children are supervised for safety.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Locutus]

ISO is a worthless org now that it has become obvious they not only allow corruption and deception but they also have refused to do anything about it. They knew months ago that Microsoft was paying business partners to join ISO and instructing them on what to say at the MSOOXML voting meetins. They/ISO have known that these fraudulent new members were not acting as concerned ISO members and voting on other ISO projects as is required and they/ISO continued to let another vote go through on MSOOXML months later.

ISO is worthless and should be disregarded until they fix what is wrong and repair the damage done in the exploitation of their poorly designed voting process by Microsoft.

As far as MSOOXML and ODF goes, it is over and Microsoft destroyed ODF just as they have done to so many public use standards in the past. Destroyed may be too harsh but they have basically diminished its value by about 90% because of the perceived openness of MSOOXML will trump choices to use ODF. MSOOXML will be viewed as some kind of vague standard and Microsoft will continue using proprietary versions in their MS Office products with mostly poor implementations of the "official" MSOOXML standard. IMO

LoB

Re:Personal Attacks?

[hey!]

Well said.

In matters of logic, it is critical to be clear about what questions are being addressed by which evidence.

The first question is the worthiness of OOXML to be an international standard. The second question is the integrity of the process under which ISO approved OOXML.

Nobody is arguing that OOXML is a bad standard because the process that approved it was corrupted. They are arguing that OOXML is a bad standard AND the process that approved it was corrupted. These questions are not unrelated; one could argue that assuming the badness of the OOXML process is evidence of the corruption of the process. However it isn't strictly necessary for one question to beg the other. There is sufficient independent evidence to consider each question separately.

It is really proponents that are confusing the two issues, and have an interest in doing so.

If the standard is bad, then the process that approved it must be questionable. Therefore, if the process that approved the proposal is above reproach, then the standard cannot be bad. We can't say, however, that because the process was bad, the proposal was bad, although it is not inconsistent to believe this.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Maxo-Texas]

It's my understanding that OOXML isn't even a standard that microsoft uses or can implement and microsoft intends to replace it in the very near future. So what was the point of this exercize? To make sure that a true open standard has a harder time getting a foothold until microsoft brings out their "real" open standard.

Now-- there is another issue... OOXML is not a true open standard-- it is patent encumbered for one thing, and can't be implemented for another.

Openoffice does a better job of opening my older word files than Word does at this point (in fact, at least a couple times a year I use it to FIX MSword documents at work that get corrupted section headers and crash Word). The thing that started this entire mess is that some governments noticed this fact with regard to their documents (i.e. Microsoft making not just the word processor you are using obsolete but making your *data* obsolete-- and in under 10 years) and passed laws saying documents were required to be in an open format so they could be read 50 years from now.

Microsoft word format is a standard-- its just not a very stable standard (changing substantially every few years) and it is not an OPEN standard. If ISO wanted to vote OOXML "the standard way one version of Word stores data" it might have been true. But they didn't-- they voted it an "Open" standard which has legal meaning to all those governments passing laws that their documents must be stored in an open format. It was a huge-- corrupt- scam job where Microsoft essentially got a standards body to label a white flour roll an apple so it would be immune to new laws saying kids had to have fruit instead of rolls with their school lunches.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Repossessed]

If Microsoft had opened up the specs for the docx and other new file formats for ISO approval, and documented them in an implementable fashion, then I (and I think, pretty much anybody who wants an office suite that can compete with Microsoft), would be thrilled. Hell, I *was* thrilled when I first heard about it.

Microsoft did not do this though, Microsoft gave us 6000 pages of an unimplementable spec, which refers to information that is not publicly available. There are serious legal questions as to whether the 'patent promise' holds any water as well, meaning that implementing the spec could cause problems for open source products. On top of it all the flagship OOXML product, Microsoft Office, does not currently appear to be following the OOXML spec properly. This is only going to get worse as ISO working committees refine the spec to fix the implementation problems Microsoft put into it.

The end result of this is that we are left with a ISO spec that has no real world implementation at all. The only thing I can really hope comes out of this is Microsoft gets hit with a fraud charge for claiming office is ISO compliant when is truth it is not.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Lknight]

Except OOXML already is the standard, or at least the spiritual successor to it. Microsoft Word is how 90% of the world creates their documents. And that's right where we want to be 20, 30 or even 50 years from now.

Here we have the company responsible for that 90% (if not more!) wanting to open up their file format and make it an ISO standard, giving the wider global community some sort of say in the process, for the first time ever. Not quite. They didn't want to open their file format, but they wanted to make it an ISO standard. They also wanted to give the global community a pat on the head to let them think that they had some sort of say in the process.

There is absolutely no reason to oppose OOXML's adoption as a standard. It already *IS* the standard and any attempts to block it are just idiots sticking their head in the sand. There is absolutely no reason to oppose ODF's adoption as a standard. It already *IS* the standard and any attempts to block it are just idiots sticking their head in the sand.

Let me repeat that: the vast majority of human beings on this planet that need to create a document in a word processor do it with some version of Microsoft Word. Period. This is *FACT*. Any move toward putting that file format into an open standard is a good move. You seem to be confused. There is a difference between a de facto standard (in this case due to a monopoly) and a derived standard (usually created and documented from technical input from known experts).

Complaining that the first version has technical flaws is just as useless. The ISO can address that with revisions. I would agree with you if it wasn't already a 'standard'. Think of other standards that you use which, if they were adopted before they addressed technical flaws, would have disastrous impacts. Want to play with the standard for electrical transmission? How about the standards that even let you use the Internet?

Some of those "flaws" are directly related to preserving the ability of a word processor to open older documents and render them properly (think un-translatable languages. will archaeologists be able to open a 100-yr old Word document in the future? 500 year old? I hope so, because that will be a regular part of the job...). So our brand new standard has to cater for the current de facto format's ability to be backward compatible with a monopolist's software package?

What would have been really great is if we had a whole bunch of other standards and incorporated them into a brand new standard! Too bad we didn't think of it before OOXML.

If you've ever read Joel's article about the file formats, you'd understand that there are some behaviors that simply can't be described other than to say "here is the piece of code that produces that output". No, still don't understand. And by the way, can you show me where Microsoft said 'here is the piece of code that produces that output' for all the binary blobs they're spewing out? Thanks!

Microsoft didn't care back then - I doubt you would have given a rat's ass in the 80s either under the same circumstances and with the same disk and memory limits. We know a lot more about software development now. Including not to tie ourselves to 80's file formats. Oops. Seems not.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who opposes the adoption of OOXML can go piss up a rope. As a developer I'm more than happy to have, for the first time ever, some readily available documentation on the file format and a standards body that will at least try to take care of the standard, whether they ever succeed or not. Well, I'm glad one of us is happy. Actually, no I'm not. If you think the OOXML file format documentation will actually help you, go read it and come back.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Maxo-Texas]

There is a way the governments can recover this...

Instead of using a title "Open", they list the characteristics they require.

* Not encumbered by patents in anyway (all involved patents must be released into the public domain immediately)
* Completely specified (nothing defined in terms of how another program works-- specify the desired behavior)
* I'm sure there are a few others but these two alone would kill OOXML from being relabeled an apple.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[Zombywuf]

That document explains no reason to adopt OOXML. Just a bunch of "We found their answer satisfactory but we're not going to tell you what it is." It does say one thing though, that OOXML DOES NOT SUPPORT ANYTHING BUT UCS-2 FOR UNICODE!

It uses XML as a base. XML can use any encoding capable of representing the characters !"'? and =. Yet it remains limited to stone age character representations. In a document format.

If that isn't evidence of a corrupt process, it's evidence of clueless incompetence.

Re:Personal Attacks?

[TheRaven64]

Or just one requirement:

Two or more, complete, independent implementations from different suppliers are available. That should be a requirement if you want good value irrespective of how open the standard is - if your supplier doesn't have to compete, what incentive do they have not to fleece you?

Re:Personal Attacks?

[sjames]

It's not surprising that MS can't follow the spec either. For years, a "word document" was little more than a memory dump From Word. As they developed new versions, they just piled more crap on top and let the stuff at the bottom go to compost. That's why it was possible to find fragments of unrelated documents in a Word document.

Then, the "magic XML" non-solution popped up so they wrapped the whole stinking crap ball up in that. You can frost a dog turd and call it wedding cake....

MS claims OOXML is some sort of specification or standard, but really it's an attempt to finally document the above crap ball. It's such a mess, they can't do it even with the complete source code revision history and the active coders that produced it.

That's also why it takes 6000 pages and still makes references to things that aren't documented. MS may or may not know what they are!

So, honestly it's not a spec at all and certainly isn't a standard, it's failed documentation.

I propose we call it POXML

[toby]

To reflect the dreadful plague that is Microsoft and all their works.

The process spoke for itself

[stox]

ISO, the best standards money can buy.

Microsoft now owns ODF,

[ozmanjusri]

This is going to get bad.

The convenor of the committee is Alex Brown, an advisor to the British Library, which was a co-sponsor of Ecma putting OOXML on the fast track.

They've basically given Microsoft control over ODF's future.

Bye bye interoperability for another couple of decades.

Re:The future

[Danse]

If Microsoft works through ISO to improve the standard, and ODF and OOXML are gradually harmonized, then all our complaining is moot Given Microsoft's past actions regarding ODF, what do you think the chances are that they will allow them to be harmonized?

Consider this silver lining: without ODF, under what other circumstances would Microsoft have turned their new document file format over to a standards body? Turned it over? They rammed it through the process using every dirty tactic they could come up with. Somehow I'm thinking that Microsoft hasn't really lost control of anything. They seem to have plenty of control over the ISO.

What exactly has changed here?

[Lknight]

There were a number of defects in the OOXML 'standard' and there is yet another working group charged with rationalizing the issues who (because of the vagueness of the 'standard') need to get the ECMA people in to 'advise' them if they could change something or not. That does not sound like they're in control.

One has to wonder who they think they're fooling. Microsoft has no obligation to implement any changes the ISO group may advise, but through the ECMA, the ISO would have no real choice.

To add further insult to injury, they're setting up yet another group to work on 'cross standard initiatives' - i.e. let's try to make ODF as useless as OOXML as a standard.

The ISO didn't have control of OOXML from the beginning. If they believe anything they do will give them control, they are sadly mistaken.

Personal attacks...

[krazytekn0]

are only uncalled for when there is no clear evidence of personal misconduct.

You missed the real story with the ISO/IEC action

[marbux]

Private deal to approve OOXML? More evidence surfaces --- Universal Interoperability Council).

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

[more]

Future relevance of ISO given their OOXML debacle

[r7]

The first question is the worthiness of OOXML to be an international standard That would be my second question. The first would be regarding ISO itself. Clearly this brings down ISO's stature as a standards setting organization by several notches. I mean how seriously can you take a standard that was adopted not on its technical merit, not because it was better than competing proposals, but because the voting members could be bought?

About incompetence

[firefly4f4]

Meanwhile some on-looking SC 34 people felt insulted. One neutral XML expert, who I know for a fact took a very close technical look at DIS 29500 asked "what are they saying? that we are incompetent? that we do not have the right to decide for ourselves?".

No, the general public is not calling them incompetent. Other technical committees are calling them incompetent.

They're just being polite about it.

I'm Sorry, Is Some ISO Maggot Making M$-Noises?

[RailGunSally]

The ISO sold its intrinsic value, in the form of its integrity and credibility, to Microsoft Corporation. Now the utterances of ISO functionaries are of no importance whatsoever, just as the standards maintained by the ISO are of no value at all. We will interpret the actions of M$ and the ISO as the damage that they truly are and simply route around them. The lesson here is that, in the brave new interconnected world, centralized authorities are single points of failure. They are utterly vulnerable to the enemies of freedom, and must be eliminated. We will therefore evolve distributed standards authorities of some fundamentally new nature. Soviet-era centralized control systems are as obsolete as proprietary operating systems. These things will chaotically destabilize and vanish to be replaced by an equilibrium of resilient, distributed algorithms.

Re:get real

[Stormwatch]

ISO is not corrupt, Microsoft corrupts ISO.

End result being: ISO is corrupt now.

Re:It doesn't Matter Anymore. XAML replaces it all

[edalytical]

It matters because Microsoft is not going to control the web...all those technologies you mention are pointless in light of:

• HTML5/XHTML2
• CSS 3
• SVG
• H.264
• JavaScript
• PDF

Microsoft's track record for cross platform web support just plain sucks. Internet Explorer for the Mac is abandonware! Microsoft quit supporting WM Player for Mac, they now distribute a third-party application. Do you think well ever see IE for Linux or WM Player for Linux? No we won't. Microsoft may be working with Mono on Moonlight, but what will happen when they abandon the project like they did with IE on Mac?

ODF/OOXML is about creating a desktop office suite interchange format to make sharing documents easier...that's all, that's what it's made for...that's not what XPS is made for. XPS is a pointless replacement for something that's not broken...PDF works just fine.

I realize you were probably being sarcastic... :-)