Charles' Open XML Royday

Charles-H Schulz looks back in anger and sarkasm to the ISO OOXML standardisation process, now that the ISO standard is published:

Now that OOXML is an ISO standard, it is perhaps time to realize that it’s not just a “dirty standard”, but a standard that has shown the complete irrelevance of ISO in the matters of IT.

I find the ISO publication rather funny.

Open XML ISO comments

ISO has published all the submitted comments to the DIS 29500. It seems that there are more than the previous set of comments that Alberto distributed.

You can get them here: http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0904.zip (the voting result is in the PDF included)

Weir: next time why not try engineering?

Rob Weir, IBM's master Open XML bug hunter writes:

"Dear boy, next time why not try acting?" I'm reminded of this line as well when I witness Microsoft's machinations in JTC1, as they attempt to get OOXML approved. They are mounting an enormous offensive and expending great sums of money to convince ISO members that this specification is an acceptable ISO standard. Someone needs to ask, "Dear boy, next time why not try engineering?" Instead trying to force this ill considered mess through ISO (causing a great deal of collateral damage in the process), why not take your great base of engineering talent and produce a standard that is not loaded with thousands of errors?

Avi says:

I was a member of the technical group that have studied OOXML specification extensively. I learned that it is unbelievable how ECMA (same guys that put together the JavaScript standard!) can think that a wannabe spec like OOXML is ready for submission. It is incomplete (does not provide mappings with legacy standards, since compatibility is OOXML goal), too long (6000+ pages), fully tied to a single product, uses deprecated substandards, promotes bad practices (embedded binary objects), has clear proprietary hooks (like “formatAsWord95″ XML tags), reinvents the wheel all around (date and color formats etc), and most of all does not have a standards-grade look and feel required for a universal and (virtually) eternal document format (doesn’t have to be perfect, but can’t be that imperfect). Shame on you, ECMA. Your position as a trusted standards organization was severely damaged.

First I was unbiased. Then I read the specification.

In my opinion, the YES-voting countries are not reading the OOXML specification, are making a pure political decision or simply don’t have a standardization process.

Hmm.

Another OOXML response

Do customers care about OOXML?

More is better?

* So clear that the Open XML standard is larger (in number of pages) than the ODF one as it contains more features.

Then UN diplomates win the clarity award, no. Some other arguments, weak:

I guess most people in the street (or in their office) don't understand what this fight about document standards is all about, and they probably don't care either.

This struggle is very unimportant and that is why there is so much fuzz.

What is clear is that the [fast-track standardisation opponents] don't seem to want users to have a competitive choices in the market or between standards.

The more riddiculous your arguments the less reasonable you sound in an official professional environment. Standard policy is very professional, you have to put forward real and good arguments. It reminds me of the foolish Microsoft public communication strategy against the EU competition authorities, you can't impress a professional community when you pretend to misunderstand the basics of ordo policy. And in the case of standards policy the implications of certain factors are very well understood.