Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Thursday 18 January 2007, 2:41 PM
Six thousand pages, one month, no chance...
Weary of cynicism, I've tried to believe that Microsoft's approach to international open document standards really does have the user in mind. I want to believe: there's enough nonsense to worry about without having to worry about gratuitously complex, changing, proprietary standards. If Microsoft agrees, as it says it does, and is genuinely on the road to taking that worry away, then by gum I'll be happy never to think about it again. It's hard, though, as the latest update from Groklaw exhaustively demonstrates.
Microsoft is in a bind. Governments worldwide mandate that only internationally agreed open standards are acceptable when creating documents - which for reasons of continuity, freedom of choice, efficiency, access and democratic control is absolutely right (if you don't agree - say so. I'll be fascinated to hear your arguments).
The trouble for Microsoft is that it has traditionally never published its document formats, because its business model includes locking out the competition by keeping secrets. Thus, although there is a perfectly good open document standard that it could adopt tomorrow if it wished, it does not so wish. But it also wants to keep all those government contracts.
Its preferred answer is to create its own open document format - OOXML - which can then be recognised as such by the international standards bodies. However, it does not want this to be something that its competitors can adopt freely.
The answer is to game the system. As part of this, the company has created (by itself, unlike Open Doc) a proposal for OOXML that is six thousand pages long, and then put it into the fast-track approval system with very minimal time for discussion and objection. However (you did read the Groklaw post, right?) even just the month allowed may be far too long for comfort. Already, eager critics have found that the standard contains many references to things -- such as old Microsoft formats -- that are not defined within it. This has two immediate effects: first, someone who wants to use the standard to build a compliant product won't be able to do so. Second, even if they did, Microsoft's pledge not to use patents to limit access to the standard does not cover stuff that's not defined within.
That's just one objection: there are many, many others - with even more are being found all the time. Please, go and read the piece, follow the links and add your eyeballs to the effort. If OOXML is too dangerous to go through as an international standard -- and, as I said, with the best will in the world I can't see it any other way -- then the more examples that can be mustered, the better.
Drop dead date is early February.
PreviousComments on this post
You falling into the IBM anti-OOXML campaign.
Oh wait, Groklaw isn't IBM, they just happen to say exactly what IBM wants them to say.
Effectifly the OOXML standard is much more mature then the current ODF ISO standard. If OOXML should not get in the ODF certainly shouldn't have. You calling ODF a perfectly good standard is just a joke right ???
It is way to light on specifying stuff so that it leaves tons of room for interpretation and the lack of a formula definition is just plain funny.
The whole ODF standard revolves on current OOo applications implementaions of that standard as starting an independant implementation of this so called standard would never lead to any compatible implementation.
OOXML is not perfect but compared to ODF it has at least the advantage that it has much better detail and focus on the needs of the global office users.
We need backwards compatibility which is somthing that ODF does not offer.
Just because ODF is open that does not mean the standard is any good !!! I do not expect ODF to be a usefull standaard for a few more years.
Albert,
please give ONE concrete example of how ODF is not mature, a specific piece of information that a global office user will use which is simply NOT possible with ODF.
If you can give one, I'll be very interested to hear it. But I doubt you can, because unlike people who THINK for themselves, you're just repeating what you read on the net written by some spotty 16 year old who doesn't like OpenOffice.
Thats what I immediately think when I read your post, it's not YOUR opinion, you're just repeating the opinion of someone else, who may or may not have copied that opinion from someone else (most likely).
You may not have the reading and writing skills to effectifly (lol, humour intended) to appreciate what this guy is saying, which is, the OOXML standard is _INCOMPLETE_ in that there are references to things that are _EXTERNAL_ to the standard, so it's _IMPOSSIBLE_ to fully implement OOXML without being Microsoft.
This has obviously escaped you, but a standard which is _MATURE_ should be fully implementable. OOXML isnt. Therefore it's not a mature standard.
But I don't expect you'd appreciate what I just said anymore than understand the meaning of what I just said, you'll probably just repeat the same old crap and expect people to believe it.
Chris
Off course there is the lack of Formula's in the ISO spec.
But there is also lot of incertainty about the embedding of objects in the specs. There seem to be different approaches for images and other media files.
How are revisions used within part of the spec that are referring to other standards like svg and mathml etcetc. and what if you want to change something that affects the whole document including the items refferred to from other standards.
What if other standards create newer versions that aren't compatible with the ODF specs or require amendments to ODF.
I cannot even find a definition of what is a valid ODF document in the spec. (which btw is something missing in OOXML as well)
The use of the ISO date format in spreadsheets ????????? Has anyone ever tried to use a representaional date format in spreadsheets ????
There is also a quite a few minor issues that I have come across on various blogs which presume will be improved upon in newer versions but for the actual ISO standardisation version of ODF 1.0 it is certainly not something that is fully matured. I think especially some things have been left alone just to make sure that a ISO certification date could be met which is probably simular to what has been done for OOXML by Ecma supported by microsoft to meet the Ecma meeting that coinsided with the introduction of the new MS Office version.
To create the perfect standard that noone could critisise might have taken forever and neither ODF or OOXML were inclined to wait longer.
You say a standard need to be fully implementable to be mature and OOXML isn't. This is not true. Tons of standards contain references to depreciated item or spec which aren't in the standard anymore. This actually also applies to various ISO standards.
Also I want to bet a big chunk of money that you would not be able to implement a ODF application supporting all of ODF and then be compatible with ANY application using ODF without consulting the specifics of that particular application. And remember that ODF actually has interoperability as its main goal. A joke when you try implemention purely based on the specs which has almost no implementation examples where mayby the OOXML spec has 1000 of it's pages with implementation examples to assist in understanding the described features.
You could easily say that OOXML is more created for interoperability and OOXML more for continuity and performance. But neither are fully ready as far as I am concerned.
I should mayby ask you as well if you have seen any critical in-depth review of ODF anywhere because it seems there is tons around which are critisising OOXML but there is precious little effort in selfcritisism by the tons of organisations supporting ODF.
So if the OOXML standard is much more mature than the current ODF ISO standard, why isn't there any application that actually implements it?
While I know at least 2 distinct applications that use the ODF format: Koffice, and Openoffice, on the other hand it seems that the OOXML "standard" is going to be used by Microsoft alone.
Even if the developers of OpenOffice should decide one day that they want to support OOXML files, they would meet rather serious difficulties implementing that six-thousands pages specifications with references to undocumented old MS Office features...
You can't call a "standard" something that is almost impossible to implement correctly for anyone (except Microsoft, of course).
Simply that shouldn't be the way the "standards" work.
