ISO Rejects OOXML Protest Appeals 258
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."
Re:MS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:standards are falling (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What you can do? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:MS (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe now someone can investigate IBM (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:standards are falling (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:standards are falling (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:What you can do? (Score:1, Interesting)
Does Open Office meet a lot of home users needs? Yes, no doubt - it does.
Is it better than MS Office? In some cases, yes. The right tool for the right job and all that. MS Office may be overkill in some scenarios and Open Office sure wins on the budget front.
But in the business world the cost of MS Office doesn't outweigh the fact that MS Office can do more, and do it more quickly still today than Open Office can.
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [msdn.com]
Misconception about HTML5 (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Why now? (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:standards are falling (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Do you mean this image (Score:2, Interesting)