Why OOXML should not be an ISO Standard and why it matters
There has been much controversy in the IT world recently over Microsoft’s new XML based file format for Microsoft Office Documents. It is called Office Open XML or OOXML for short. Microsoft want to make this an international standard and accepted formally as such by ISO. There are many standards used in computing, many internet standards are set by the IETF. The IETF has produced many standards in computing over the years ranging from important to rather silly. The members are largely volunteers or individuals sponsored by their employers, they do a lot of good work, but it is in some ways a little informal (not that “informal” is a bad thing, it seems to have worked quite well so far.).
ISO is rather different from the IETF. The members of ISO are 158 of the 195 countries in the world. Many of the ISO standards are used in laws and treaties. Take a look at the list of ISO standards, one thing I notice about them is that the standards don’t just document existing practices, they strive to be good. For example ISO-216 specifies paper sizes using a sensible series of ratios so that if you fold an A4 sheet it becomes the size of an A5 sheet. Fold an A4 sheet into 3 and it will fit in a C4 envelope. Sensible stuff, well thought out, logical and more idealistic than the mess of different paper sizes in different countries that went before it. This is a good standard, adopted almost everywhere in the world. If only the Americans had joined in then there would be many fewer printers flashing “tray 1 load letter”.
Now lets look at the crown jewels, ISO-31 Quantities and Units. This defines distance in terms of meters, mass in kilogrammes and time in seconds the metric system was designed to be good. It does not define distance in furlongs, mass in firkins and time in fortnights. That would be stupid.
Imagine if you will that there is an ISO standard for weights and measures. You have a company that makes measuring devices. You sell speedometers calibrated in Furlongs/Fortnight. You sell stopwatches that tick in microfortnights. You sell a machine that will speak your weight in centifirkins. Now you want to sell products that conform to an ISO standard. What do you do? Perhaps retool your production lines and re-calibrate your products to measure meters, kilogrammes and seconds? Or maybe through bribery and corruption (sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant) get your units through the ISO standardization process.
Now what would Microsoft do? They don’t seem to be following the path which would lead to interoperability between office suites. They don’t appear to want to use a standard which was designed to be good. They want a standard which was designed to be theirs.
August 31st, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Within the United States, when I go to plug in an electrical appliance, I don’t have ANY concern that the plug won’t fit. Thats due to the “standard”. When I build HTML & CSS for a web page there is also a standard, but, its mostly meaningless.
In my opinion, the HUGE difference is participation. When Microsoft was way behind in the browser wars (v2 ish) Netscape had a huge lead. I believe that Microsoft as the challenger played things very well. If you think about it, it must have really pained them to implement javascript, but they did it because thats what it took to get market share. Those were the times that we heard a lot from them about Embrace and Extend.
I’d like to see MS take some hits that matter. I think it would be good for their ego to loose a couple of battles. But, I don’t think its reasonable to do this by out debating or out lawyering them. They are good! MS will be beat by building a better product. The “standard” will not impact the winner of this battle.
I was a visicalc user, then a 123 user before I ever touched Excel. When I typed @sum in Excel it was wrong, but, Excel knew what I meant and converted my at formula to the equal syntax.
When I go into openoffice I feel lost. I’m one of those people that does use more than the bottom 10% of Excel.
This is my opinion and I know quite a few people disagree with me, but, the openoffice developers are just not trying hard enough. If they would build a better product, the issue of “standard” would disolve away.
August 31st, 2007 at 8:21 pm
When I go to the United States I have to take adapters. I know damn well the plug won’t fit. There isn’t an international standard for electrical plugs. Setting an international standard would involve looking at the various existing practices and deciding which are the good features and standardising upon those. The US plugs without earth pins wobble about and can generally be pulled out by tugging on the cable. UK plugs have the lead coming out sideways and always have an earth pin, they are quite hard to pull out by the lead. Maybe Japanese plugs have some clever and logical feature that could contribute to an international standard for plugs. Perhaps the thin flat pins on the US plugs are just as capable of carrying 13amps of current and use less copper than the fat UK pins. Setting an International Standard isn’t just a case of deciding that there are lots of American plugs already so we will just use that. It isn’t about OpenOffice.org as such, although it was based on the rather sensibly designed OpenOffice.org file formats. Think of it as starting with a nice solid UK plug, and then making it work for everyone. The point is the standard should be selected on technical merit and when it is well adopted it will prevent me from buying yet another adapter from Dixons Gatwick airside.
September 1st, 2007 at 2:38 am
Dwight,
In fact, there are no web ‘Standards’ that I’m aware of. Everything ‘web’ from IETF (that is, HTTP and up) are at best “Standards Track” RFCs, but most are plain RFCs with no intention of getting on the Standards Track. Some are designated Best Current Practices (ooooh!). See RFC 3700 (a.k.a Internet Standard 1).
W3C does not issue Standards, it issues Recommendations, which I suppose is like saying “Heres how we think you should do it. Try not to screw it up too badly.”
Living in the US since birth, I have on several occasions had difficulty plugging something in correctly, mostly when polarized plugs came out (one blade’s a bit larger than the other, quite common these days though). Regardless, I’m lost and confused each time I get a new version of Word, so the switch to OO isn’t too difficult for most of us. Then again, I haven’t been ‘not lost’ in a word processor since WordStar, so take that for what its worth… ( I mean, please, tell me who but the typesetting professional truly cares about kerning?).
If the standard doesn’t matter then why go through the effort of stacking the voting panels (and apparently risking anti-trust actions)? I’d say Microsoft thinks the standard matters very much (remember, they’ve only really learned about the concept of ’standards’ somewhat recently, so cut ‘em some slack)… I’d have to agree with them on that.
Finally, for what its worth, I for one am truly embarrassed by my country’s continued use of miles, pounds and gallons when far, far better means of measurement exist. But you have to remember, this stuff was introduced to the US during the mid-20th century when everything not American was brushed aside as ’some evil Commie thing’ The metric system was clearly nothing more than ‘yet another’ Communist plot to undermine American values (I’m not making this up. I have relatives who honestly believed this — you know, the kind of folks who wont eat Swiss cheese even though it comes from Wisconsin). Thus, we are to this day saddled with a system of units and measures from centuries ago when we defined things by the size of the King’s… who knows what.
-jmr
September 1st, 2007 at 7:05 pm
The thing that gauls me most about the whole M$ OOXML thing is the way they are literally “forcing” through a specification which has been ripped to shreds technically by many independent standards type techies.
It is NOT A GOOD specification for a standard. If Microsoft went away from this, took the technical comments on-board and designed a specification that fixed most of the stupid things like dates before 1900 nor working and all the cruft in the spec which requires the implementer to “doLineBreaksLikeWord97″ then it would probably sail through with little or no serious criticism.
This process [for M$] is nothing but an attempt to keep their monopoly on document storage. If you use Excel, who owns your data? You are the the only company in the world that can sell you software tools to provide access to your contents… When they upgrade their apps, you are pretty much forced to upgrade too or else your data eventually becomes obsolete and unreadable. There is already an ISO standard for documents - it’s called ODF. Why couldn’t M$ have worked with that? Because they would lose their monopoly on your data - that’s why.
This OOXML (Ecma-376 to give it it’s proper name) is not implementable by anyone other than M$ or their puppets, will only operate correctly on Windows software, and is technically very bad in many, many ways. It should not become a standard.
December 27th, 2008 at 8:03 am
iso consultants…
In 1979, the British Standards Institution (BSI) developed the first commercial standard for quality systems that became known as BS 5750. That same year, BSI issued its first certificate to a small cement plant in England for compliance with BS 5750. …