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David Overton's Blog » Help to make the Office 2007 document type a standard (Open XML) - click the link
Help to make the Office 2007 document type a standard (Open XML) - click the link

I love standards - they make life easier. TCP is one, ODF is one, SNA is one, ASCII and EBDIC are.  Even PDF is one.  It just makes life easier.  In this connected world standards are a good thing and sometimes more than one standard is very good.  Microsoft has offered the Open XML (Office 2007 document format) as a standard too.  We can have it as a standard in a short time frame or a long time frame. I want you to sign the petition to help it happen in the short time frame.  Even Novell are supporting this as they see it as just making their customers lives easier.

Go here and sign the petition to help move things forward in the short time frame.

If you want to see how developers could use the standard have a look at http://openxmldeveloper.org/posts.aspx.

You might wonder why I am asking you to do this.  Well I've read the text at the microsoft.com site on Open XML and I like the idea of this being a public standard that people can write to without having to pay for the right to do so and the knowledge that writing to the standard will give them good interoperability.  My 1st three years after University was writing document converters, including those for Microsoft Office and Open XML would have made my life MUCH MUCH easier.

To aid interoperability, XML-based file formats can unlock data in documents and help integrate front- and back-office processes. Recognising these benefits, Microsoft has implemented XML-based formats in successive releases of Office.

Both public and private sector customers have expressed their preference for making Open XML an open standard so that they have broad rights to use, without cost, any Microsoft patents necessary to implement all or part of the format.

Responding to this, Microsoft and others called for the standardisation of Open XML. On 7 Dec 2006 Ecma International, a highly respected standardisation body, approved the adoption of Open XML as an international open standard.

The strengths of Ecma Open XML are clear:

  • Ecma Open XML was developed through the collaborative efforts of leading companies such as Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the US Library of Congress.
  • Ecma Open XML is backward compatible with billions of archived documents held by the private and public sectors.
  • Any company can freely implement and develop innovative products using Ecma Open XML
  • Ecma Open XML enables interoperability, accommodates multiple languages and cultures, and supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices.

Customers want choice, interoperability and innovation. We and others believe that Open XML achieves all these goals. We look forward to supporting Ecma as it works closely with national standards bodies throughout the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) / International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) process.

If you agree that Open XML should be approved as an ISO standard please sign this petition, which we will send to the Chairman of the British Standards Institute to demonstrate broad support for this initiative in the UK.

Source: Openxml - Microsoft UK

Sign the petition today and help to make Open XML a standard for the future.

 

ttfn

David

 

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Posted Wed, Apr 4 2007 7:55 AM by David Overton
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Comments

Lee Evans wrote re: Help to make the Office 2007 document type a standard (Open XML) - click the link
on Wed, Apr 4 2007 10:07 AM

This is a subject very close to my heart - I've worked on document conversion engines for a large & widely used open source application in the past and having reliable, implementable, open standards for document formats is absolutely something I am in favour of. When Microsoft decided to make their new document format an open, XML based standard I was pleased to say the least. Unfortunately, my support in this matter is currently swayed in the other direction. I am absolutely in favour of Microsoft's document format being implemented as an open standard, but unfortunately in its current format its "openness" is in serious doubt. 19 out of 20 countries (Great Britain being 1) submitted objections to the JCT recently. The following article details a number of the reasons and objections http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections.

I should say that I'm also not a member of the rather zealous open source camp which seems rather unrealistically hell-bent on seeing Open XML ditched altogether in favour of the ODF standard - I'd love to see Microsoft's format adopted as an open standard, I would just like to see it done with the concerns addressed and after a full review process, rather than being fast-tracked through an established process unduly.

David Overton wrote re: Help to make the Office 2007 document type a standard (Open XML) - click the link
on Thu, Apr 5 2007 2:04 PM

Lee,

I understand where you are coming from, but the process you are after has already happened.  If you read how ISO makes its standards it either:

- goes through the process from beginning to end itself finalised with a voting process to ratify the standard

- take a standard that has been ratified by a trusted standards body (ECMA, OASIS and others) and puts it through the same vote process

(http://www.iso.org/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/whowhenhow/proc/deliverables/iso_stan.html)

ECMA has already been through this process and created the Open XML standard. I understand the desire for consultation, however I suspect things might be a little beyond that.  Office 2007 has shipped with an XML format - we have an opportunity to tie that standard to something that is not just an ECMA standard, but also an ISO standard.  I don't want to see one standard for ECMA (and used in the Office 2007 product) and a different for ISO - this would not be a good thing for the industry.

The only possibility of a longer review would be to treat Open XML as a standard that did not exist and I don't think this is a reality.  

You might think "well hang on", but this is exactly the process OASIS did to get ODF approved.  So, on this basis, I think we should trust the process that ECMA went through (the UK is part of ECMA too) to get the standard approved and approve the 2nd standard.  It is not uncommon for more than one standard to exist that serve different purposes – such as ASCII and EDBIC or ODF and Open XML.  It will enable open source projects to interoperate with Office 2007 and other products to use the interface.  Microsoft has sponsored the ODF project to provide a set of interop tools, but looking at the ODF standard it has a lot of short comings for Office documents – you like charts in Excel – sorry, not part of ODF.  There are many other examples too, but in my personal opinion it sort of leaves us with no choice – make a bigger and extensible standard and have people work with Office or don’t.

As always, thanks for your comments.  I hope you believe me when I say I think the discussion is good given the fact that I have published your comments.

Thanks

David

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