Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Tuesday 4 March 2008, 3:42 PM
OOXML debacle - time to take away ECMA's toys?
There's one thing that comes across over and over again in the latest responses to the ODF/OOXML document wars, and that is a deep distrust of ECMA.
Originally known as the European Computer Manfucturers' Association, ECMA is 46 years old, and has had a "fast track" arrangement with the international standards body, ISO for more than 20 years.
National standards bodies have fast track arrangements. That way, if our own BSI or the US ANSI, make good standards, ISO can make them available to the world. ISO can also adopt standards from other bodies, such as the IEEE or the Internet's IETF.
But ECMA, for some reason, has the same status as a national body, and can push anything it likes ISO's way, in the hope that the international body will endorse it.
Sometimes this has good results - Sun gave it Javascript, and that is now an ISO standard, under the name ECMAscript. But ECMA's Wikipedia page has a very short list of successful standards, from the last twenty years.
ECMA is widely seen as pushing vendor-specific standards, and OOXML is just the lastest and most controversial: "If ISO doesn’t figure out away to detach this toxic leech, this kind of abuse is going to happen again and again," says Tim Bray, one of the writers of the XML standard.
PreviousComments on this post
Dear Mr. Judge, OOXML is neither a "debacle" nor is the ISO/IEC Fast Track procedure Ecma's "toy".
Ecma is a well respected standardization body with a long history. If you want to find out more about it and its present and past standards please visit the Ecma webpage at "www.ecma-international.org".
Regarding Ecma's history and its A-Liaison status with ISO/IEC JTC 1 please read Mr. Jan van den Beld's blog. In short ISO and Ecma have been working together from the very beginning that Fast track is a win-win situation for both that is the reason why Ecma is a frequent Fast Track submitter. The advantage on the ISO/IEC side is getting with a speed a standard that is often not possible to achieve with normal JTC 1 standardization speeds. For Ecma the broader ISO publication is an advantage too.
Ecma had and has a long list of successful standards, e.g. also all CD and VDV standards come from Ecma, then the popular U3D Standard that is implemented in all Adobe Readers, many important Enterprise Communication Standards, such as QSIG, just to mention a few.
The language that you are using in your blog reminds me of the darkest time in human history.... Please to consider that we are talking about voluntary industry standards...
I noticed this on their web site also, found it interesting.
Programme of work:
1. To Produce a formal Standard for office productivity documents which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats
This includes:
* Produce a standard which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats, including full and comprehensive documentation of those formats in the style of an international standard, with particular attention given to enabling the implementation of the Office Open XML Formats by a wide set of tools and platforms in order to foster interoperability across office productivity applications and with line-of-business systems.
* Produce a comprehensive set of W3C XML Schemas for the Office Open XML Formats, with particular attention given to self documentation of the schemas and testing of the XSDs for validation using a wide variety of XSD tools of the market and cross platform.
2. To contribute the Ecma Office Open XML Formats standards to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for approval and adoption by ISO and IEC.
Upon completion of the Previous Items, the role of the Technical Committee will be:
3. To assume responsibility for maintaining the Ecma Office Open XML standard
4. To evaluate and consider proposals for complementary or additional technology
5. To assume responsibility for the evolution of the Ecma standard while ensuring backward compatibility with the previous versions to guarantee continuity in the use of the current and future formats
6. To establish and maintain liaison with other Ecma TCs and with other Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) as appropriate to facilitate and promulgate the work of the TC.
Chairmen
Mr. J. Paoli (Microsoft)
Mrs. I. Valet-Harper (Microsoft)
Vice-Chairman
Mr. A. Farquhar (British Library)
Secretary
Dr. Istvan Sebestyen (Ecma)
Thank you both for your comments.
I am aware of ECMA's history, lake100 - I covered it fairly extensively, 15 years ago, along with other standards bodies. In particular, I watched the very well-meant PCTE software engineering standard.
I understand A liaison status, and I think it is a good idea. ECMA has indeed produced good work on areas including DVD and tape standards (I'm not sure whehter a standard implemented in Adobe products is a good advert for multivendor standards - is it also used elsewhere?).
My earlier post does give ECMA some credit, but probably not enough - I edited in a remark about these other standards in my earlier post, but lost it, either through clumsiness or a publishing problem, for which I do apologise.
Regardless of past glories, however, I think you would be very hard put to find anyone with no vested interest in OOXML, who thinks this current process ia anything other than a debacle.
You may be such a person, but I can't tell as you don't identify yourself - care to tell us more about why you
Thanks stor1940
Can you explain what particularly interests you in that part of the ECMA site?
I think ator1940 was suggesting double speak (or other) in the first starred item in paragraph 1, amongst other suggestions left to the imagination.
Either way, the objectives of this particular starred item were not achieved and quite possibly deliberately blocked.
