What Happens Next on the US Vote on OOXML

Andy Updegrove writes "As you may know, V1, the INCITS Technical Committee that had charge of the US vote on Microsoft's OOXML, failed to reach consensus on either approving or disapproving the specification. As expected, Microsoft has turned to the full INCITS Executive Board in an effort to salvage the situation. Between now and Labor Day, a complicated series of fall-back ballots and meetings has been scheduled to see whether the Executive Board can agree to approve or disapprove OOXML, in either case "with comments." A vote to approve would mean that addressing the comments would not be required for the US vote to stand, while a vote to disapprove would hold the possibility of US approval if the comments are satisfactorily addressed. The bottom line is that a vote to approve (either in the US or in many other nations around the world) does not appear likely, due to the sheer number of technical issues that have been raised with OOXML, and the expedited schedule upon which Microsoft has insisted throughout the process."

A friend in need ...

is a friend indeed, as they say.

Following the report by V1 that it had failed to achieve consensus, Microsoft requested a place on the agenda at the Executive Board meeting held in California on July 18 - 20, in order to make a short presentation on the V1 events. That presentation occurred on Thursday of last week. However, after giving the brief overview, the Microsoft representative made a motion not provided for on the agenda (which was immediately seconded by the Apple representative) that the Executive Board consider a written ballot of "Approval with Comments," with the comments in question being the 96 issues that the V1 members had succeeded in agreeing upon before ending their deliberations. That would have meant that some 400 additional comments (the more difficult ones upon which consensus had not been reached) that V1 had received from various sources would not have been submitted to ISO/IEC JTC1 if the ballot passed.

Interesting, although unsurprising, to see Apple following the money here.

US vote or ISO vote?

Big difference. If it's the International Standards Organisation that's voting; it should not be subject to the machinations of the company that submits the standard under scrutiny.

According to the earlier article, V1 and INCITS were both extensions of the ISO evaluation process. Not just a US agency.

didn't know what OOXML meant

Thought it might be Open Office XML but found out that it means

"Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) formats"

Thought others might want to know.

Re:didn't know what OOXML meant

Don't feel bad about not knowing -- the confusion was intentional on Microsoft's part.

No OOXML; Maybe Not ODF

I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting OOXML to go away.

I know government is dog-ass slow, so I am not terribly up in arms, but agreeing to some open standard for government documents (not controlled by MS, but not necessarily ODF) is obviously the best choice for archival storage, transparency, and maintainability.

Re:No OOXML; Maybe Not ODF

Save that the specs are ridiculously huge, and full of what really amount to undocumented references. It's not a useful specification.

Feds to M$

Show Me The Money!

I, for one, am for choice

I prefer choice. Having an ODF standard should not exclude an OOXML standard. With both standards published, it is possible then for developers to include support for each. Just like good syndicated news readers have the ability to handle both ATOM and RSS x.x.

In the end, its about choice. With standared, published formats it is possible. Or, would you rather the MS Office document standard to remain closed? (Perhaps that is what those whose goal in life is to bitch endlessy about MS want?)

Re:I, for one, am for choice

Or, would you rather the MS Office document standard to remain closed?

OOXML doesn't open it.

It just describes it, and incompletely at that.

The sole purpose of OOXML is to torpedo any real standard document format. With Microsoft's machinations in the various ISO committees, it's ridiculous to continue pretending they have any intention of allowing real interoperability.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

Or, would you rather the MS Office document standard to remain closed?

OOXML is still closed. When the spec has things like "This element means to parse it like Word97 with all of Word97's obscure bugs", that's not an open standard. What we're opposed to is having garbage like that officially recognized as an open standard.

It doesn't belong

You don't put something in a specification and not define how it works. It has no place in the specification. That's the whole point.

If they weren't in the spec, it wouldn't be the complete OOXML spec used by by Office '07.

So here we have Microsoft working backwards. They take what they did and try to create a specification for it instead of creating a specification and then programming to it. Then they leave out parts of what is actually done in Office '07 so that other parties can never be compliant with the "specification". That would be akin to the TCP specification [faqs.org] saying that bit 2 in byte 14 is a flag that says the checksum should be calculated like Windows 95 does it, without specifying how that is. This is just ridiculous. Do you not understand that some documents (probably all docs imported from Word 95 which I know is in the spec, I'm not sure about Word 97) WILL use this tag, and therefore anyone trying to comply with this specification will not be able to make the documents appear as they will in Office 2007? When importing a document from Word 95 or 97, Office 2007 should convert it completely to values defined in the specification, there should be no need for these tags for "backward compatibility".

If the specification has no way to make the spacing look the same, I would say that it is an incomplete specification (although it is 700+ pages). If there are certain quirks of Word 95 and Word 97 that would make the specification hard to understand, it doesn't matter. They should be defined exactly anyway so that ANYONE implementing the specification (and only the specification) will be able to produce documents that look the same.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

Maybe you should read about the actual OOXML specification before saying that kinda thing.

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-fa ilure.html [robweir.com]
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematic ally-.html [openmalaysiablog.com]
http://www.noooxml.org/ [noooxml.org]
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2007/07/18/T18_02_54 / [janik.cz]

Read these. Then decide if you really, really believe that making this specification a standard will do anything good for the environment. The spec is simply too big and poorly-defined for anyone else to come close to implementing. If it was worth the paper it was printed on (and if you see the last link, that can be quite a lot) Microsoft wouldn't be trying to fast-track it--specifications should speak for themselves in terms of quality. Anything reasonable would have no trouble getting written into an ISO-accepted standard, no matter what company it came from.

Pop quiz: Why the hell is fast tracking with this kind of system possible? Emergency economic situations?

Re:I, for one, am for choice

In an open market of ideas, that's how it works.

Precondition: Open market.

Reality: MS has been found guilty of antitrust violations and leveraging its OS monopoly to support and gain market its shares in other markets.

Check: The only software capable of even competing with the market leader product is being given away for free.

Conclusion: The "desktop computer office suite" market is not an open market.

Re:I, for one, am for choice

Wouldn't that be nice?

Unfortunately, the current OOXML (The Microsoft format) is so messy it's unmaintainable and unimplementable. Major holes, parts with undocumented binary data, etc. It's all a last-ditch attempt for Microsoft to continue it's office monopoly.

They are being way sneaky with the naming too. Note that the Open Office.org is called ODF (Open Document Format), while Microsoft sneakily called theirs OOXML (Office Open XML) - which confuses everyone, as many people think that OOXML is the "good" format, since they reasonably assume that OOXML means "Open Office XML". But it's not.

Our best attack right now is to make as many people as we can knowledgable of this name game.

ODF: Good and Open
OOXML: Bad and Closed by Microsoft. (It's not truly open when it comes to the details of the format)

Re:I, for one, am for choice

Choice in products, not in standards. You want GE and Sylvania and all other light bulb vendors fighting to sell you a light bulb which will fit the fixture you have in your house. GE should not be promoting its own "snap in" bulbs and Sylvania pushing its "screw in" standard and Phillips proposing a spring loaded catch standard. Just yesterday I discovered that the table lamp I bought from IKEA uses a bulb R17, and even IKEA does not carry replacement bulbs. I get R12 and R26 but not R17. Three "standard" bulb types and they manage to screw me. That lamp is junk now. That is what happens when you have multiple standards.

Do you really want both Betamax and VHS? Do you really want both DVD and Laserdisk? Come on. Demand real open standards. It is not about free software. It is not about open software. It is not about non-commercial software. It is perfectly OK to have two or three proprietary closed software supporting ODF and one or two Open Source but not-free software and a couple of Open Source and free software all supporting one document standard with perfect portability across them.

Only when users demand the ability to switch from one software to another without any loss of functionality they will have the power in negotiation. In the present situation, they have to buy whatever MSFT charges. Did you really think people will be forking over 150$ for a spreadsheet and word processor 10 years ago? The whole MS Office was selling for 50$. Now it is supposed to be 500$. Dont you see where the customers lost the ability to negotiate better prices because of vendor lock in?

I seek clarification

Is it possible to implement with relative ease into ODF, all the features that Microsoft sees lacking in ODF? If possible, Microsoft should help in this effort and then standardize on ODF or tell us the disadvantages of using ODF together with all features that Microsoft wants.

This is so petty I can't believe it.

We have two open standards. The Microsoft (a big company) open standard is setup to be backwards compatible with all the weird crap imposed by their prior formats (which makes sense, since documents tend to be stored in these formats), whereas as ODF is completely new format pushed by another massive software company... Sun (and sometimes IBM, another friendly open source lollipop factory).

What does this have to do with anything? Last I checked, OpenOffice can save in xml and Microsoft Word can save in ODF (with a plugin). This is like a cock-flexing match between the FSF and Microsoft and it's basically irrelevant to 99.99% of users and government employees.

If ODF, as it stands, were released by Microsoft and called Microsoft ODF, we'd have the same level of FSF, GNU, etc pushback.

Isn't mainstream software development about adaptation and matching and supporting standards- not massive legal battles for complete control?

I got your document format... RTF

I've used M$ word, and corel, star office, and OO pretty extensively, even taught courses in M$ Office certification, and other that just making documents an eyesore, I still see a reason we can't just use RTF... Course me sending in resumes in RTF might also explain why I can't get a decent job...

Standard Defined

A "standard" means one, not several -- especially when they don't interoperate with each other.

Don't bet that OOXML is dead, just yet.

Microsoft had to do some heavy hacking (and stacking of the standards organizations), just to get OOXML this far. Don't presume that they're not continuing their legal footwork behind the scenes to make sure that the people who need to vote for OOXML don't just give up and vote 'yes' to get Microsoft off of their back (or get MS money in their pocket, or whatever it is that MS pushes as a reason to vote for OOXML).

Watch this situation closely, and if you can put your hand into the process to make sure that it flows properly, I'd suggest that you consider doing just that.

Re:The specs dead, but is INCITS credibility?

As opposed to ODF with a bunch of backers with potentially unknown IP claims, admittedly incomplete spec and a patent grant only valid for versions of the specifications that are blessed by Sun Microsystems... which means that Sun gets all the say they want or there will be NO ODF revisions.

Re:Is there anything we can do...

Is there anything we can do to get this thrown out the window for being a horrible standard as it should have originally?

It's looking more likely than ever that Microsoft isn't going to be able to win this one. Even with its attempted stacking of the deck, this unusable "standard" couldn't get quick approval.

It's a minor point, sadly. There's nothing requiring Microsoft to follow any standard. They have built their software empire in part on avoiding all such things. The one thing that looks to be shaking the foundations of their dominance is the fact that most of the people I've talked to have looked at Office 2007 and do not like what they see.

Re:The specs dead, but is INCITS credibility?

You need to understand that they is little more than a bunch of people whom Microsoft paid to join INCITS. So yeah, they couldn't care less.