re: Help to make the Office 2007 document type a standard (Open XML) - click the link

David Overton — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:04:52 GMT

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

re: Help to make the Office 2007 document type a standard (Open XML) - click the link

Lee Evans — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:07:56 GMT

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.