Microsoft XML Fast-Tracked Despite Complaints

Lars Skovlund writes "Groklaw reports that the Microsoft Office XML standard is being put on the fast track in ISO despite the detailed complaints from national standards bodies. The move seems to be the decision of one person, Lisa Rachjel, secretariat of the ISO Joint Technical Committee, according to a comment made by her."

Fifteen years late

[HomelessInLaJolla]

The industry is fifteen years down the wrong path. We (many of us) tried to warn our nontechnical peers before things came to this point. We tried to express the benefits of a diverse field. We tried to illustrate the merits of alternative technologies. We tried to sing the praises of other operating systems and other companies. The sad fact is that computer technology was wrestled away from the true technologists who invented it and was thrust headlong to the public sector by the businessmen, politicians, stock brokers, and bankers who saw a massive profit potential in it but had no real knowledge or appreciation of the intellectual advancements which created it.

Billions of dollars in taxpayer money were funnelled, through government grants, contracts, and subsidies, into social circles and corporations who had demonstrated a willingness to put aside the morals and values of the true scientists in favor of ensuring their own priveleged paychecks, pensions, and long term profit margins. The American taxpayers subsidized the startup of the .com bubble, we paid for the infrastructure on which the rest of the internet was built, and we paid for the products, the software, and the services on the consumer end. Where, then, did the profits from the .com bubble go? The profits went into the hands of the same major investment groups who have been carefully profiling and controlling the market for generations--people who, when the .com bubble became the .com bust, shrewdly bought the real estate being sold by the common people seeking to ameliorate their losses (which had been carefully planned by those people who were now buying their real estate at dirt cheap prices). When America began to return to consciousness after the .com blackout we now find that the same real estate which we sold to keep ourselves from bankruptcy is being rented or sold back to us--as condos, apartments, are housing communities--at three, four, ten, even hundreds of times the cost.

The pyramid [slashdot.org] scheme [slashdot.org] is so beautiful we could almost cry for joy if we were on the financial winning side of it. As it is we have no choice but to cope with a world where Motorola is relegated to handhelds, HP has partnered with Compaq and become just another x86 retailer, and Microsoft holds a betting majority of the chips when it comes to influencing the direction of software development and globally recognized protocols.

Limited number of choices here

[cdrguru]

Well, I suppose a standard could be created based on the documentation from Microsoft. It is hardly an independently-implementable standard, however.

Alternatively, a workable standard that is truely interoperable could be accepted that is not anything Microsoft would implement.

I seriously doubt there is much middle ground between these two positions. Microsoft is after all in a position to just say no.

The real problem is that even with (X)HTML/CSS it is not currently possible to take two different implementations and produce the same printed output from the same source material. This is a far, far simplier standard than anything being discussed as a word processing format, and yet there is no common implementation. I am not even sure there is today an accepted "correct" implementation for printing HTML.

How are we going to have a multi-implementation standard for word processing that produces identical formatted documents? I would say it is clear we are not going to have this. This makes the "standards" process a joke.

If you somehow believe that the "presentation" can be separated from the "content" in important documents, you probably need to have more familiarity with government processes.

Re:There are lots of bad standards.

[Anonymous Coward]

OOXML is not nescesarily a bad standard.
Just not a perfect standard.
I wrote already in my blog about this:
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/03/ooxml-hoax -6-iso-fasttracking-requires.html [blogspot.com]

I think that Groklaw is trying to discredit OOXML in a very anoying way by hiding the realities of both formats. Groklaw seems to sit on the IBM bandwagon in a big way. (though I might be biased because any positive comment on OOXML I put on Groklaw has been moderated away)

It would have been better if slashdot had linked to the original article in stead of the Groklaw interpretation of it.
Original article here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012860&intsrc=new s_ts_head [computerworld.com]

--
The Wraith
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Re:You won't get what you want from MS Office XML

[TekPolitik]

their new XML is as poorly defined as any of their formats

It's actually much worse than the /. article you linked to would suggest. That article merely suggests there are undocumented bits, but the truth is that a substantial portion of the documentation is flat out wrong. If you follow the documentation, I guarantee you that your file will not be readable in any version of Microsoft Office.

This 'could' be a good thing!

[Dan_Bercell]

I know no slashdoter wanted this (too much anti-ms in the air), but think of the bright side.

MS has the market by the balls with the only real competition being the WordPerfect suite...Personally I do not like it, but it is fairly widely used in School in Canada. Anything that allows Word documents to be a bit easier to convert to other formats is a good thing.

Re:hmm

[KingMotley]

All 6 of the complaints were about technical issues. The 1-month fast track approval is not the correct place to raise those types of issues. The only thing that can keep something from getting fast track approval is an objection that highlights why it conflicts with standard that has already been approved. None of the 6 complaints did this, so it was pushed through.

They can of course, raise the same complaints during the 5 month ballot process, which is the correct time to raise such concerns. Although, 6 out of 100+ is still a fairly small number.

so...

[Tom]

how much did Lisa get paid for her efforts? Was it cash or "perks"?

Yeah, mod me flamebait. I'd prefer having that checked anyways, even if just to be sure there was no foul play. With MS, the safe assumption is that someone involved didn't play by the rules.

Re:This is to get past the pending laws

[DragonWriter]

Or, better, should specify that software acquired for use by public agencies must both be open-source and use open standard formats by a date certain, except where no suitable alternative to fill a need exists and sponsoring a conforming new system would be prohibitive.

Re:hmm

[Samari711]

Funny, I thought this standard conflicted with the ISO standard for time because it incorrectly treats 1900 as a leap year in spreadsheets.

Re:hmm

[harlows_monkeys]

The problem with Microsoft's "standard" is that in many places it says things like "do what Word 5.0.3 does in when in double-line-spaced mode" without saying just what that means

Isn't that just for use when converting documents from Word 5.0.3 format? New documents won't use that tag.

Compare to ODF, where key formatting parameters are left up to the application, so that if you had two completely independent ODF implementations, written just from the "standard", documents produced by one would would probably look quite different when read by the other.

Re:hmm

[bersl2]

That being said, OOXML is vastly better specified than ODF is. As I pointed out on my blog some time ago, it would not be possible to build a spreadsheet today using the ODF specification, too many details would have to be extracted from either the OOXML spec (oh, the irony!) or an existing implementation that was based on public information like the Excel documentation (Gnumeric, Open Office).

Sigh... [wikipedia.org]

I don't agree with the Opera guy

[shis-ka-bob]

HTML and CSS are a great solution for screen displays, an OK solution for printing (assuming CSS 2.1). So, HTML/CSS would be a great solution for presentation software. But they are not particularly good at expressing structured documents like a spreadsheets, relational data and rich text documents. I don't seem how HTML tables would be a natural starting point for a spreadsheet, for example.

The original use of HTML was to create links to rich content, which in the case of CERN would be things like postscript files generated by LaTeX. Postscript has been effectively replaced by PDF files, and LaTeX has been (in)effectively replaced by word processors. The original model is still pretty good, hypertext for linking documents that are written in a markup language that expresses content and document structure and displayed in a portable display format. These are three rather different needs, although I will agree that HTML has become much better as a display language, it still isn't the equal for PDFs for print.

The Opera CTO, Hakon Wium Lie, also stated of OOXML and ODF, 'Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them'. If this was true, why did the KOffice team adopt ODF before it was an ISO standard? Surely they could find more enjoyable coding problems than making KOffice able to read and write OpenOffice.org memory dumps. To me, ODF looks a lot less like a memory dump and a lot more like markup (HTML) than does OOXML.