Ecma Receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Standards 182
Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft's Office Open XML document format attracted 3,522 comments from the national standards bodies that participated last summer in balloting that has so far derailed the effort to certify the format as an ISO standard.
Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week. Ecma International is a Swiss standards body that already ratified Open XML and is guiding the format through the ISO.
According to Jones many of the 3,500-plus comments, consisting mainly of objections and suggested changes to Ecma's standards proposal, overlap with one another. "When you group them into similar buckets, it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list," he said. Still, he apparently acknowledged that the number of comments was "still pretty impressive."
Open XML just missed out on a fast-track to approval as an ISO standard in the initial balloting that concluded in early September. Ecma's proposal won a majority of the votes that were cast but not enough to meet the requirements for approval.
Ecma has until January 14 to provide responses and rebuttals to the comments submitted by the national standards bodies. The issues raised will then be debated at a so-called ballot resolution meeting that ISO will hold starting February 25, after which the various national standards bodies will have a chance to amend their vote — the last chance for Open XML to be approved."
Now let's see the reply (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:common criticisms (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely. And why fix the problems? We already have a standard: ODF. Microsoft has yet to put forward a halfway persuasive argument as to why we need another. In some cases different standards meet different needs, but generally speaking having more than one standard is inefficient. Even if the problems are fixed, in the absence of a good reason for having multiple standards, the answer to Microsoft's proposal should be that they're too late.
Can ISO even make decisions anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose they will crawl out of the woodwork for this vote but one would think there would have to be other votes in the lead up.
Re:common criticisms (Score:4, Insightful)
Read out this statement : "OpenDocument Format is a world-recognised ISO standard. MOOXML is not a world-recognised ISO standard".
Now, if you were in charge of a monster-sized company which is also a monopoly, wouldn't you balk at that sentence?
In Microsoft's "mind", one of the ways in which they can counter the threat (to them) of ODF becoming a widely-used format, is to make its own format - MOOXLML - become an ISO standard - that way they can market their own format as such, and of course this format is also one their "lock-in" formats which they'll use to swat out the competition - yet again. This is why you see all these sudden new sign-ups to the ISO who suddenly saw the light and voted for MOOXML.
And that's precisely WHY they want MOOXML to be made an ISO standard.
Re:common criticisms (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, I understand why Microsoft wants OOXML to be a standard. My point is, I don't think that there is a reason for anyone else to make it a standard, even if it isn't broken.
Re:Now let's see the reply (Score:3, Insightful)
They are like Bush or any other radical right wing politician - you are with us or against us. It has nothing to do with Open XML.
Re:Or it could just die. (Score:4, Insightful)
Open XML JUST missed out on fast-track?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
More accurate would be "After extensive rigging of the fast track voting process, Open XML STILL failed to gain enough votes to progress into fast track voting".
What Microsoft did to the ISO voting process has damaged this standards setting institute in both credibility and functionality (and has quite nicely identified those participants who can not be trusted to remain with technical merits only, like what happened in Switzerland). The side effects of their ISO vote rigging are still felt because there are now issues with other, non-Microsoft related standards that grind to a halt as the wannabee voters (i.e. the MS paid crowd) are simply not interested or involved in the day-to-day running.
Personally, I think those late members ought to be banned for life from ever going near the process again, but so should be anything introduced by Microsoft if you want to do it right.
It seems anything MS touches turns to lead nowadays, and HP has finally started to reveal the truth about those 'great, "on track" sales of Vista': Yet Another Myth.
Surely Redmond must be able to see the light at some point? It's all good and well running after the innovation train and pick things up later, but it gets difficult when that train accelerates and you're not on board..
Re:More people wasting their time ... (Score:4, Insightful)
In today's Slashdot, you're far more likely to be modded down for negative comments on Microsoft.
Personally, I suspect their marketing team (or a proxy) is gaming user-moderated tech sites.
Please use the correct name! (Score:5, Insightful)
The standard format "Extensible Markup Language" otherwise known as XML, is already "open" and has absolutely nothing to do with XML itself (other than using that particular format for wrapping up its data/contet).
Why is that important? Because Microsoft has a (successful) strategy of sucking up general terms like "XML" and turning them into their own. If the world starts calling their new document format "Open XML" it won't be long before all non-IT people think that XML is either something out of Redmond, or that Microsoft made it "open". This has happened before, and Microsoft are really good at it. My boss and perhaps 80% of our customers insist that an "SQL Server" is a Microsoft product, and they falsely connect "SQL" with something from Microsoft. And I often meet young students (age 16-19) who think Microsoft invented the TCP/IP network protocol, only because Windows calls the protocol "Microsoft TCP/IP" in the Windows operating system.
I am not a Microsoft-flamer. In fact, I work with development of Microsoft-based IT systems. But I still object to the degradation/transformation of general terms or standards, which falsely make them sound like they are from Microsoft.
In short: The new document standard from Microsoft, used by Microsoft Office, is named "Office Open XML", and there is no such thing as "Open XML". The Extensible Markup Language, XML, is published by W3C [w3c.org] and is already "open".
- Jesper
Re:In a word: "sort of" (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly.
Microsoft isn't scared of a few competitors to it's full Office Suite - they can do a lot of marketing to make up for the product's shortfalls.
What they're scared of is an entire ecosystem of specialised document producers and consumers. A standard and open document format has the potential to revolutionise the way we create and manage information. It could be as big a force for change as http/html was in it's day.
If ODF is adopted massively, it will precipitate the change, because it's an easy format to construct from raw data, and it's easy to parse. OOXML is much harder to work with, so if it becomes the standard, the barrier for small developers is set much higher.
Microsoft came close to missing the boat with the shift to the Web. Now they're determined to stifle the next wave.
Re:Babelfish. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't just use an XML schema, because they don't capture the semantics of the document. You would need to define an ontology as well. The problem is that once you've defined a language sufficiently expressive to define the specification, you may as well just use that rather than define the specification in it.
Re:More people wasting their time ... (Score:4, Insightful)
My theory is that we have an influx of wet-behind-the-ears IT "professionals", fresh out of a 3-month course at some diploma mill and now proud holders of a MSCE diploma or some such, and therefore knowing-- with absolute certainty -- that Microsoft is the be-all and end-all of all things IT and their ticket to success. And now here on Slashdot out to "show us" old farts.
Which reminds me of a guy I know who never used a computer for anything, tried starting various businesses ranging from candy dispenser machines to hot-dog stands, and eventually got one of those MSCEs or A+ or what not (in 3 months) following which he started an IT business whereby he "fixes" people's computers. The business is wildly successful in appearance, with big ads all over town and the clientele mostly consisting of people even less computer literate then him (of which there is a lot) ... although there appears to be not much repeat business. Fear not, ads are big and flashy and one is born every ... you get the idea. His selling point? "No computer gurus here!". I kid you not. It is of course impossible to talk to him now, since he "knows" the IT industry better then everyone, according to him and his wallet. Still hasn't seen a rack-mount server though. "Who uses those anyhow? (snicker)".
Needless to say he worships greed and sees Bill Gates as the living incarnation of some sort of God of Profit. But which does not stop him from selling copies of MS Office on CD-Rs to old ladies ...
I would not be surprised to see him spouting some nonsense here.
Re:Or it could just die. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, yes, obviously this is a reason to create a new, entirely different standard, rather than extending ODF. You know, when Macromedia invented Flash, it was a mistake to embed it in HTML -- obviously, they should've invented FlashML, to power the Myspace Generation Internet.
Never mind that had the very idea been brought up in the ODF community, it'd be laughed down. Maybe we should have "boldandfontsizelikeWord2003Heading1"? Or, we could, you know, extend the style engine so you can just have a Word2003Heading1 style.
Actually, the format is closed, exactly because of bullshit like that -- that nowhere in their six thousand page spec did they find the space to explain what lineBreaksLikeWord97 actually means, let alone make the standard flexible enough that custom line break styles could be defined entirely in the document, and not in the application.
So yes, I would rather they stuck to proprietary, binary formats, so people like you would stop being able to pretend OOXML is an open standard, when it's neither. I wouldn't even mind people like you, were it not for the fact that there are plenty of you in government.