Archive for the 'OOXML' Category

I have been updating dis29500.org importing lots of new data in the form of the leaked dispositions and adding a new system for tagging and some Dojo prettyness. Have a play and let me know if anything breaks. Feel free to blog about it too, there will be a bit of a relaunch in the next few days, but it would be nice if the lotus blogosphere got the scoop on it.

so the mainstream press is waking up to the story. No headlines on the front pages of the UK press that I could see, but this morning at Waterloo station (where the Bourne Ultimatum was filmed) they were handing out free copies of the WSJ with the ISO vote as the front page news.

update: some of my figures were wrong, there are more than 69 P and O countries in total, but 69 non-abstaining countries.

Well the good news is that the many comments and technical criticisms of Microsoft’s flawed standard will now actually get read. It hasn’t been kicked out altogether, there will be a meeting in Geneva in March of representatives of all the national bodies who voted “disapproval with comments” plus representatives of all national bodies who are members of the SC34 committee (they can send 1 or more representatives, I am not sure how many countries this involves, it could be anything from the 34 P members listed in the SC34 secretariat’s report to the 69 P and O members who just voted), plus any of the national bodies who voted approval with comments who want to go. It could be a big meeting.

The countries who abstained but are a member of SC34 are an interesting group. Sweden SIS is a member of the SC34 committee so they can turn up, however they abstained so their comments won’t be on the agenda (there is no “abstained with comments” vote). Sweden were going to vote disapproval with comments, but Microsoft saw which way it was going, didn’t like it, and fixed the vote. They got caught and SIS invalidated the vote and abstained.

Microsoft gave their view on the result in a press release today. Sounds good:

“The results show that 51 ISO members, representing 74 percent of all qualified votes, stated their support for ratification of Open XML”

Well they think that 51 out of 69 countries voted for them. Not quite. It is a bit misleading to mix up the important P members with the slightly less important O members and call them ‘qualified votes’, it glosses over the fact that many countries who voted “approval with comments” really want their comments addressed (they should have voted disapproval with comments) but that isn’t the big problem.

Microsoft are counting in their 51 “supporting votes” 16 countries who abstained from the vote. This includes countries, like Sweden, who abstained because they uncovered corruption by Microsoft.

I compiled the almost full list of votes (Hungary seems to be absent without leave) into a spreadsheet, it is of course in ODF format.

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.