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ISO Rejects OOXML Protest Appeals
snydeq writes "ISO and IEC gave OOXML the greenlight after organization leaders rejected appeals from four countries to protest the vote that approved OOXML as a standard. According to an ISO press statement, appeals by the national bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela did not garner support from two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, which is required by ISO/IEC rules to keep the appeals process alive."
See NoOOXML, OpenDot, NoOOXML">Boycott Novell and Groklaw for better analysis. People are very angry about this and they should be.
RIP ISO 2008
Correct NoOOXML link. This was one of the first and best of the bunch.
Historically, it always ends in fighting.
Armed revolution.
Foreign takeover.
Collapse into anarchy.
Breed like rabbits, vote against the current leaders, and get labeled undesirable and attacked.
Pick your poison.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Some governments are passing laws saying that documents must be stored in a format that is a documented standard.
This is just MS's way of checking that box without actually making their format open.
You are right in that they don't want to open their format, but they need to have the appearance of having one.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Nice to see that the price for ISO members was high enough to prevent appeals from going through.
Standards for sale.
Act now before the prices go up.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
See the problem is that ODF makes life easier on you especially if you change applications in the future. OOXML makes it harder on you. But MS is not concerned about you being able to read any format as they are concerned in keeping you tied to their products. If you use OOXML, you can't change applications easily. That might be a bit pessimistic. As of this writing no application, not even MS Office can read and write OOXML reliably so maybe OOXML may never make it to wide adoption.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Thats how we got into this mess in the first place. Rather than accepting ISO decision to make ODF the international standard. Micrsoft decided everyone already uses office, so we'll use that instead. Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant(easy to do when you define what that standard is). ODF is still a standard as well though, although I don't know what good will come of there being two standards.
So, the ISO needs to allocate a defense budget now. Excellent; let's hope they use Excel to crunch the numbers.
This is only in the spotlight because it matters to anti-MS geeks. International standards have ALWAYS been such a freagin mess. It has always been a fight of power and money. "Fine, we will let you have your feature in the standard, if our technology is part of the standard too, then we'll vote for your proposition, and you vote for our proposition tomorrow".
Its why many are so stupidly hard to implement, are political mess (XHTML2 anyone?), and why corporations eventually feel the need to make their own, to just bypass it all and be done with it.
It was -always- this way. ISO has -always- been a freagin joke, and most people who implemeneted their crap already know this (ISO9001, lol). This is just a whole lot of same old same old.
It wouldn't be enough (though it's certainly better than nothing). I doubt that MS actually expects anyone to use OOXML, as it is pretty close to impossible to implement. But when they have to go before government agencies in various countries to answer for their monopolistic, unfair business practices they get to say, "we contributed an open document standard, and we're a big contributor to the Apache Foundation. Heck, we're all about open source and freedom!" And since government bureaucrats are not exactly the hardest people to trick when it comes to technology issues, that will carry a lot of weight. And "membership" has other benefits, which can be leveraged to poison the whole pot.
MS is simply buying its way in to "OSS", just as it has done with so many more traditional competitors before destroying them. This is very, very bad.
Caveat Utilitor
What can you do? Pick one: soap box, ballot box, natalie portman's box, ammo box. Note that the first 2 have been ineffective, and the 3rd is overrated.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Keep using OpenOffice? I know, it sounds drastic but if everyone did and didn't give a damn about what ISO does, wouldn't that be enough?
Thing is, it OOXML were a good standard, or even a standard in the sense that it actually documented something which was implementable.. then there wouldn't be such an outcry.
ISO exists because of an information/communication bottleneck which no longer exists to quite the same extent today. The need to have a central repository of standards outweighed the requirement for fitness of those individual standards.
But, given the multiple documented abuses of process, ISO is actually propelling us rapidly towards a future where more standards are able to be created and maintained outside of the vast bureaucratic machine. I'd credit F/OSS before ISO, but the latter are accelerating the process.
The damage to the standard has been done. There has been so much negative press swirling around OOXML that ISO approval at this point is largely symbolic and meaningless.
Microsoft shot itself in the foot by trying to bribe national ISO members instead of keeping it on the downlow and improving OOXML to appease those obsessive standard-freaks. But then again, this is Microsoft we're talking about.
I'm not a luddite and would gladly try new things (including Microsoft things), but my perception of OOXML is so low based on all the news stories I've read that I'd rather switch to papyrus than save a document in .docx
AC, your detailed technical analysis has convinced me to never trust Groklaws again. Thank you for such an insightful and objective assertion of opinion as, "unlike most readers, whenever the criticism was of a technical nature, I went to the spec itself and checked. ... those sites often lied about objective matters of fact." Such excellence is par for the course with AC comments. How can I ever thank you for saving me from "ignorance"?
Norway has decided that all official documents must be available through ODF, PDF or HTML; which ever is most suited to the information in question. Also schools and public offices must accept ODF as a valid format. This is because no policy should require citizens to purchase expensive software to use public services. Among other things.
The Long Now Foundation
What you say is certainly true, but my point is not anti-MS specifically, but is a much more general one. We all have to live by standards (that's why we have law) and if some do not comply it inevitably causes chaos. While the transgressors often benefit, others suffer. Normally one 'standard' wins the battle of public aceptance, but it's often not the best one, it's the one that's promoted by people who are prepared to do whatever is necesary to win! What's best for the majority is a side issue, and this can't be good.
Smivs on the intertubes!
My point is that "respected" bodies like ISO aren't falling. They've hit the lowest ground years (and in some cases, decades) ago. This particular event is nothing new: its always how it has been, and why most of these standards suck ass, from ISO to the W3C and beyond. It didn't reach a new low or anything, it has done much, much worse.
The whole idea of "independant standard bodies" is about as flawed as the idea behind software patents. It simply cannot work, and I'm not sure what the alternative is.
I know which of those sounds more fun....
I think that the ISO just proved they are just another group of administrative people and have nothing to do with good reliable standards.
ISO/OSI 7 layer model, anyone?
its a paper thing but almost never real running code. CMIP anyone? no? you prefer snmp which actually WORKS and is a real standard?
yes, ISO is a laughing stock. the wars between the IETF guys and the OSI guys were funny to watch some 20 yrs ago. IETF did real stuff and OSI just measurebated (yes, intentional misspelling).
nothing really new here.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Exactly what would there be to investigate? Is paying an employee to write on a blog against the law?
Seems like "Because we hate Microsoft" isn't a compelling enough reason for the ISO.
True, but "unimplementable" should be.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Is that a carrot in your pocket, or...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It is not about "We head Microsoft", it is about the fact that something like WordWrapLikeWord95 should not exist in an ISO standard.
...
BTW: There was a very interesting graph in the German magazine c't. The essence was as follows:
XHTML: ~100 pages, ~400 days of standardization process
ODF: ~800 pages, ~900 days
SVG: ~600 pages. ~1050 days
SOAP: ~200 pages, ~950 days
OOXML: ~6500 pages, ~350 days.
You've no idea how incredible that looks in a graph...
XHTML2 may be a political mess, and while it flatlines, HTML5 (a technical mess) is being prepared to be forced down our throats... get ready to choke on a big mouthful of bloat, tag soup, and presentational tags.
At least the ISO has some authority (rotten as it is), but the W3C is impotent, and has been for years.
What *we* can do when the goverments, corporations and organisations are corrupted and we cant turn to ask help from them, because those who has power, controls those who could help us....?
Despite the name, ISO is not an international organization in the same sense as e.g. WTO or WIPO are international organizations with countries as members. ISO is simply a cartel of national "standardization organizations". Everyone has the right to start an organization to compete with them. I believe that ISO is so strongly committed to acting in the best interest of the dinosaurs that there is no real alternative anymore to doing this. If you agree, please join us at OpenISO.org.
The net result of this mess looks like no program can claim to be standards compliant. No one other than M$ will be able to support OOXML due to the incomplete specification and M$ has shown no interest in supporting ODF.
Then maybe it's time we started demanding standards that were truly fit for purpose. That could be the one true thing to come out of this mess. It it raises general in the technical community of how badly broken ISO is, then maybe we're seeing the first steps on the road to a workable standards process.
In any event, there's nothing to be gained by accepting the status quo, and everything to gain from making a fuss. Good standards are important. If ISO can't deliver them we need a standards body that can.
I think you're conflating two ideas there. Firstly, there's the notion of a standard is a technical specification that (I expect and demand) everyone can implement and conform to. Secondly, there's the notion of a sort of government monopoly - in the sense that if YoYoDyne Inc control Standard X and the govt mandates that all frobnitz conform to Standard X, then only YoYoDyne can practically market frobnitz.
The point I think you're missing is that if a standard is a standard in the first sense, then the abuse implicit in the second scenario is impossible. It's not that standards are inherently broken, it's that closed, proprietary standards are broken. And so the problem comes back to IP rather than standards, per se.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I guess most of the countries' representatives ond't effectively govern as well as you could. Too bad you can't rule the world and bring us the Utopia in your head :)
Who do you think that these wonderful leaders are? They put their pants on one leg at a time just like you and me. Most of the bureaucrats who prepare these decisions are no more educated than you or I. Governments, even authoritarian ones, are the people.
What's more, I live in a democratic republic, and in such a system, the people must participate or it fails. Questioning government positions is part of what you call a country's "political discourse," which is necessary for the society as a whole to come to a coherent decision that expresses itself in elections.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Last year I was in a car accident. Someone rear-ended me and totaled my car. The insurance agent called me, and without seeing the car or knowing any facts, said I was 15% liable for being rear-ended. I didn't speed, I stayed in my lane, etc. I called a lawyer who said I was screwed. There wasn't enough money to justify fighting the case in court. The body shop guy said he saw it ever day in my state, that the insurance company wouldn't pay the full claim and just screwed people if the case was small enough to stay out of court. He saw someone parked on the street had their car totaled, and the insurance company said they were partially liable for being parked on the street legally. If the car wasn't on the road, it never would have been hit.
I was furious, so I called my state senator to talk about the partial liability law. We have term limits, so he wasn't up for reelection and wouldn't personally benefit, but he called me back several times to get info. He researched the law, and several cases like mine where we were ripped off. Then he went into legislation and fixed the law.
Sometimes there are a few decent people in office who want to do good. But if you never bring these things to their attention, nothing will ever be done.
Contacting your elected officials may not work, but it beats doing nothing.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The W3C makes a lot more standards than just HTML/CSS, and its standards sucked long before Microsoft failed to implement them, and even those that are perfectly (or mostly so) implemented everywhere still also suck.
All it does is spit out standard specifications that are more bloated than Vista on a bad day, and virtually everything that falls under its wings go that way. Its just the same as ISO: its multiple bodies pushing for their ideas and goals and instead of filtering the good from the bad, they implement everything to keep everyone happy (SOAP). Or not enough to make a few key people happy in their own little world (CSS... even with CSS 3.0, if it was fully implementing, you'd still be missing a lot of stuff. "You shouldn't need to have vertical control in a document!!! Welcome to the real world, idealistic zealot").
They'd still be that way, Microsoft or not.
Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant
Ironically, they are NOT compliant with the version of OOXML that ISO/IEC approved, which isn't the same as the version of OOXML that ECMA originally handed them. (It's not even clear that the ECMA OOXML spec conformed fully to what Microsoft Office does, but that's a moot point now.)
-- Alastair
I totally agree with you. My posts were to point out that if we make a fuss about the WRONG THING, the eventual fixes won't fix anything. Too many people here seem to think that ISO fell because an overly powerful evil corporation pushed it around. But it fell because EVERYONE have ALWAYS been pushing it around. Thats very important to understand, else the next standard body or whatever will fall the same way, just without the big buzz to notify us that it did, like this.
I'm not... again, I was trying to show the real problem. OOXML is open in the sense that anyone can implement it. Its just totally hellish to do so because a big corporation's ideas were forced into it: like virtually ALL freagin standards, from OOXML to SOAP going by tons of IEEE stuff. Lots of them are extremely hard to implement, and seriously, if I had the choice between implementing OOXML and implementing HTML 5.0 and CSS 3.0, I'd sure as hell pick the former, its easier! There isn't even a perfect implementation of XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 for christ' sake (or did FF3.0 and the latest webkit FINALLY did it? Because I have seen VAST difference in behavior between FF2.0, FF3.0, Safari and Opera, so its not just Microsoft having trouble. And I'm not talking about the defaults being different, since thats valid by the standards).
These are all open standards. But its damn near impossible to implement them. You can get 90-95% right with several years and big money behind it (ok, I don't think Opera has the founding of Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla Foundation, so thumbs up to them to be getting so close), but good lord!
Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant
Ironically, they are NOT compliant with the version of OOXML that ISO/IEC approved, which isn't the same as the version of OOXML that ECMA originally handed them. (It's not even clear that the ECMA OOXML spec conformed fully to what Microsoft Office does, but that's a moot point now.)
I'm sure Microsoft are much happier with the idea of tweaking the XML output in a future service pack then they are with having to compete on a level playing field with OpenOffice.
Furthermore, Microsoft said they won't even attempt to get Office 2007 to support it via a Service Pack. Instead, they won't attempt to support that standard until the next version of Office at the earliest, and that could mean at any point in that product's life span.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I tend to look at it like this...
If nobody speaks up, Microsoft has won. There are a lot of underhanded business practices that MS has "gotten away with" because nobody cared to speak up. If people just let it die off, it opens door for other companies to undermine the standards practices because "people will soon forget."
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I think what the numbers mean is: the more impossible something is, the less time I want to spend reviewing it. SVG is worth getting right; OOXML is worth nothing.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They don't even need the appearance.
They just have to match the legal requirements.
It is like the word games redefining torture as not being torture.
It is like defining a rope with a hook as a "braking system".
If the law says torture is illegal, just make sure your actions are legally not torture.
If the law requires a braking system, just make sure a rope with a hook is defined as a braking system.
If the law requires and open standard, just make sure some government or standards body calls it an "open standard". It does not have to actually be open.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But then, Slashdot is now a pro-Microsoft camp - so why all the belly-aching? I see so much praise heaped up on Microsoft here nowadays that I wonder if they'd forgotten OSS and *nix which was their original focus and forgotten the damage Microsoft has perpetuated on the computing industry as a whole. After all, it's not FAT32.com - it's Slashdot.com - but then who here even knows what that stands for anymore?
Uh... WTF? Is this just stuff added onto the end of your post to get extra modpoints because your point is just that Microsoft bribed people.... with 0 evidence that bribery took place? I'm not saying that MS is squeaky clean in all this, but you just made a nebulous accusation without backing it up with substance, and then spent the bulk of your post on psychological misdirection to pander to Slashdot's moderators.... Hey wait! All flash and no substance, you don't write speeches for politicians do you?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Here. 7,525 validation errors. He's the same guy that reported that MSOffice had about 122,000 OOXML errors.
Though I admit that I have some doubts about his methodology for the ODF test.
That is entirely true, which is why Plato argued that people should have superior education. Now, in the modern world, what constitutes superior eduction? Superior to what Plato knew of? Superior to what they have now? Or superior to the standard required to understand the basics of contemporary life, the technologies and societies within it, and the interactions between them? I would argue that that last option should define the minimum standard acceptable for anyone, that better should be encouraged but that since all people have some input to geopolitics, major business decisions, community policies that are likely to have a wider impact, and so on, we should never tolerate a standard of ignorance that perpetuates ignorance and harm.
Arguably, what I'm asking for is not going to be easy or cheap, but if you optimize the quality of the population, you must also optimize their ability to function together, their ability to make good decisions, and their ability to reduce unnecessary damage. At some point, the additional value brought will equal the additional cost to improve standards. That is the "ideal" point, as any more investment is burning money with no benefits and could be put elsewhere for better gain.
A "utopian" society is not a stress-free society by this standard, and there'll still be plenty of bigotry and abuse. Rather, a "utopian" society by this standard is the greatest ability and greatest freedom to choose a different path, with the least possible negative consequences for not being selfish and harmful, because people will have the understanding and tools to make genuine choices, not choices they have copied from someone else without really knowing why, or choices out of fear. To me, "utopia" isn't about perfection, it's about balance. Better understanding with no means of using that understanding isn't more "perfect" than a balance between the two. Nor is superior technology than our ability to understand what it does, why, and whether there are longer-term effects that need to be considered.
Technology should not be held back in fear, nor should understanding. By my definition of "utopia", if one is racing ahead, you should develop the counterpart until it catches up. (As a completely pointless exercise, I came up with six variables you'd need to push hard on, to keep them as close together as possible, to produce the most stable and most enlightened civilization that can be achieved at that time. I believe firmly that allowing any of those six variables to backslide will invariably destabilize society and corrupt understanding, and that all civilizations that have ever declined have done so with that being the core reason, the actual mechanics being a mere secondary effect resulting from this primary cause.)
I believe that the ignorance shown by the ISO board is a direct consequence of that board being unbalanced by my definition. It has poor understanding of the engineering and an even poorer understanding of the social consequences, simply so that it can play with shiny new toys. If there's such a thing as reincarnation, we now know what happens to cats when they die - they become board directors.
I fully accept that there'll be plenty of people who disagree with my notion of "utopia" being a state of optimized relative dynamic equilibrium, where the absolute states are always increasing, and it'd probably be a lot of people's idea of a dystopia, as it is inherently restless and requires active intervention rather than allowing the different markets to independently determine their relative pace. I also agree that a regulated balancing act of this kind may in fact not be achievable in practice, but I've yet to hear any convincing argument as to why not, only the usual stuff about big governments, which doesn't even apply to this.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You've no idea how incredible that looks in graph...
You've now have an idea how incredible that looks in graph...
It is not about "We head Microsoft", it is about the fact that something like WordWrapLikeWord95 should not exist in an ISO standard.
Slashdotters are so ignorant on OOXML yet speak so authoritatively on the subject.
WordWrapLikeWord95 isn't in the ISO standard as an opaque concept like it was in the ECMA standard. WordWrapLikeWord95, et al, are fully detailed in the ISO standard as to exactly what you'd need to do to implement them, should you wish to do so. (Those settings have also been deprecated, only for use when reading the small percentage of old documents that originally used those settings; new documents should not use them, period.)
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/01/18/suppresstopspacingwp-compat-settings-1.aspx
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
because he said so
I never understood this thing about putting your pants (we call them trousers over here) on one leg at a time. You sit on the edge of your bed, fold your legs up, and slide them simultaneously into both trouser legs. It's much easier than doing them sequentially - why would anyone do that?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The "messy" tags and features are non-conforming (AKA deprecated). They are in the spec only because they have to be documented somewhere for browser creators. If you wrote browser that doesn't support <font> & co., even google.com wouldn't render properly (try gaining market share with such browser).
They also don't show the results of going the other way - saving in one of the other apps and opening in the 'reference implementation.' They are not comparing any product's implementation of either spec. If MS Office produced something completely unrelated to OOXML then you would likely get the same results due to reverse-engineering attempts by the other products.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Further, there are mathematical differences between the spec and what Microsoft Office does. Now which do you think an implementor will implement? Your interoperability study is based on reverse engineering, not on following any OOXML specification.
Yet further, there are defects remaining in OOXML that were not addressed and that prevent interoperability. When you try to make a specification in such a short period of time this is to be expected.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
did not garner support from two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, which is required by ISO/IEC rules to keep the appeals process alive.
Oh sure, now they start following the rules!
Care to name any of those presentational tags in HTML 5? All of the ones I saw were semantic apart from the audio and video tags. Whether tag soup is allowed depends on whether you use the SGML or XML bindings (and even then you aren't allowed overlapping tags, just ones that aren't closed). As for bloat, they're not allowing anything into the spec that doesn't have two independent implementations, so at least two browser writers have to think it's a good idea - I've spent the last month running in to real-world problems that HTML 5 has proposed solutions to and wishing I was living a few years in the future and could use them instead of some horrible work-arounds.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It wasn't my insurance company. The company insured the guy who hit me, and they were State Farm.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The sad thing is, all those people who "need nothing more than a glorified WordPad" don't even need that either. All they actually need is WordPad, or maybe even NotePad.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The idiom probably predates the common person owning an elevated bed. I've always assumed that it sprung from the fact that a manservant WOULD put their masters pants on both legs at once while their master was sitting on an elevated bed.
A commoner, having a flat pallet for a bed, would slide one leg of their breeches on and then the other as holding both legs off the ground at once is quite a challenge for most people.
What any of this has to do with ooxml I really have no idea.
Deserves what they get.
To anyone even moderately clueful, even from 200 yards the whiff of SharePoint says: Run away! Do not walk, run! This is not going to help you or your business in any way! This is a tarpit from which you and your data will never escape. You will be tied into Windows and whatever other tortures arrive down the pike - if you don't Just Turn Around Now and RUN! Microsoft has PLANS for you and your money... Locking up your data forever is just a means to an end...
It's extortion. Theft. Deception. And it's time we stopped tolerating it, because we know better - the Open Web itself is proof of technology and ideals that are the civilised alternative to anything Microsoft ever plotted.
you had me at #!
That's what she said!
2^5
http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/rick.png
ODF 1.0 has many defects as well and OASIS is only now trying to correct them several years after submitting the standard to ISO.
The Wraith http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/