Open standards in Norway

Norway has published a new policy about the use of document standards in the state:

The Norwegian Government has decided that all information on state-operated web sites should be accessible in the open document formats HTML, PDF or ODF. This means an end to the time when public documents are published in closed formats only.

I find this policy very sensible and it would be nice if the Danish government would end up with a similar policy. That would put more pressure on MS to implement proper support for ODF.

Great article about MS OOXML

Microsoft is of course still working on getting their OOXML format accepted as an open standarda at ISO. I'm of the opinion that it should never be accepted and this article is another in a long row of articles that explains why: THE DEPRECATED “SMOKE SCREEN” OF MS OFFICE OPEN XML (OOXML)

Here is a quote:

Launch Microsoft Office and try to save a file in the format specified by the draft standard at ISO. You can’t. There is no compatibility mode in Microsoft Office that limits input to the feature set specified in the official Microsoft Office Open XML draft ISO standard. Any suggestions of interoperability for anyone wanting to support the Microsoft Office Open XML specification is ridiculous, especially since Microsoft itself won’t allow its customers to write to that format.

The OpenDocument Foundation

The press have been writing sensational articles about the OpenDocument Foundation because they have been out saying that ODF have no chance of succes and that they will now go a different route and drop ODF. How significant is the OpenDocument Foundation? From what I can tell, it is 3 persons! Yes, you read right, 3 persons. Why they have decided to do what they have done is beyond my understanding but Andy Updegrove have written a nice blog post thoroughly debunking their claims.

The conclusion is clear: ODF is alive and well.

Formulars in OOXML and ODF

This has been something especially the MS side has been talking about because the ODF 1.0 specification doesn't really contain much in that regard. I find it quite lame of MS since they had every chance of taking part of this process when ODF 1.0 was created. When MS says that ODF don't support what they need, then it is really their own fault entirely. Of course, there is no doubt the reason is that MS wants to keep their monopoly in the office marked.

Back to the formulars which is an area where MS says OOXML is vastly better than ODF - this wikipedia entry shows that history is a bit different and that in fact no such specification have existed until now. The formular support for ODF is now well underway and it will end up in an upcomming version of ODF. Rob Weir, an ODF support, has posted an interesting analysis of how well OOXML actually does and his conclusion is a bit scary:

As I've shown, in the rush to write a 6,000 page standard in less than a year, Ecma dropped the ball. OOXML's spreadsheet formula is worse than missing. It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to this standard, would raise important health, safety and environmental concerns, aside from the obvious financial risks of a spreadsheet that calculates incorrect results. This standard is seriously messed up. Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.

Here is another post that follows up on Rob Weir's post and the conclusion is similar:

So when it comes to comparing MSOOXML and ODF v1.0 on the basis of the inclusion of "Formula Definitions", it becomes clear that the anti-ODF folk have not much to shout about. In fact MSOOXML's "Formula Definition" is deficient and inaccurate. As Rob Weir pointed out, in addition to this CEILING problem, most of the other formulae are inadequately defined and not well tested.

I recommend reading both in full. I haven't spent time checking these by reading the specifications, so I can't say for sure that these posts are correct but I haven't seen anyone refuting them either.

Various OOXML and ODF info

First there is this Wikipedia article about OpenFormula where the following bit of history can be read:

"In 2005, Microsoft's Brian Jones noted that OpenDocument did not define spreadsheet formulas in detail (Jones, 2005). However, at the time Microsoft's competing proprietary XML format also did not include this kind of detailed specification for formulas (Wheeler, November 7, 2005).

Microsoft continued to protest that OpenDocument could not be used because it did not define a format for spreadsheet formulas, yet its own specification continued to omit any specification about formulas through April 2006. Finally, in May 2006, Microsoft also began defining formulas in its XML format, 15 months after the first version of OpenFormula and 3 months after OASIS posted its first official draft of its specification."

Next, VML is "deprecated" in OOXML, but it is still being used.

Q&A with Gary Edwards, President of the OpenDocument Foundation.

OOXML vs ODF - the stakes are high

Currently, Microsoft is trying to get their OOXML format to become an ISO standard and the success there is very important to them. If it is rejected then governments around the world is likely to choose the competing ODF format as their document standard. A thing Microsoft most certainly don't want. this rant from Rob Weir (an IBM employee) details some of the recent things that have happened, here is a snippet:

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 recently had its annual plenary. This is the same group of ISO National Body (NB) members who voted in favor of ODF last year, and over the next few months many of them will be recommending positions on Microsoft's OOXML to their national standards bodies. I was on the delegates list for attending this meeting, as a representative of the US NB, but had to cancel at the last minute because of a family emergency. When I saw the attendance list, I was surprised to see that Microsoft had sent five people, this to a meeting of only 37 people. They practically darkened the skies with their employees. And what about the conspiratorial army that is hounding them at every corner? Zero people from IBM. Zero as well for Google, Sun, RedHat, Adobe, Oracle and Novell.

More about OOXML and Denmark

Andy Updegrove have posted more info about OOXML and ISO, here is a snippet:

Q: Got it. So let's get down to business. I hear that Microsoft's Tom Robertson was quoted in eWeek saying that 103 nations have standards bodies "with the authority to act at the ISO on behalf of that country," and that ,"What we see is that only a small handful have submitted comments." MS' Brian Jones also says at his blog that " It sounds like about 18 of the 100+ countries reviewing the standard came back with comments."

So just how big a deal is that, anyway?

A: Well, let's start with the denominator, which is really 66 – not 100+ or 103. Only Principle Members and Observer Members can offer contradictions under the JTC 1 rules, and there are only 27 Principal and 39 Observer Members. By my count, that's 66 – less than 2/3's of Robertson's and Jones' numbers. How about the numerator? Is it 18? Nope. 19? Keep going. It's actually 20.

What these contradictions are isn't known, but they should be made public late this month. It will be quite interesting to see them.

Not too long ago we got a law here in Denmark that made open standards a requirement. How valuable that is depends on how you define "open standards". I would say that in general this is a positive step. In regards to document formats, it seems they are already using PDF 1.5 (which isn't really an open standard, but Adobe has just decided to make it an open standard) and according to this danish article, both ODF and OOXML will be supported and used. It is good to see that ODF is going to be used/supported and to be honest, it is not surprising that OOXML is too because Microsoft Office formats is simply used everywhere. It sucks and it would have been nice if they skipped OOXML and used ODF only + a plugin for MS Office that allowed them to save documents in the ODF format since Microsoft isn't willing to support it natively in their otherwise quite fine Office suite.

Microsoft ODF Translator v1.0

So, it has been released, but is it any good? The answer seems to be a big NO and maybe more interesting to know is that it will never work:

The abridged version of the story is that XSLT methods for transforming from one dialect of W3C-conforming XML to another dialect of W3C-conforming XML will always work. It is definitional. If it does not work, then one of the "W3C-conforming" dialects is a punk. Well, we and Microsoft know XSLT well enough to know in advance that the design of Microsoft Office Open XML would make it impossible for this, the Clever Age approach, to work for the Translator. Let me say this clearly: Microsoft knew in advance that XSLT would provide shitty tranform from Microsoft Office Open XML to ODF and they funded the Clever Age project to use this method.

None of that is surprising of course, Microsoft is simply trying to protect their big cash cow (MS Office) and they will use any and all tricks in the book to keep their lock-in.

MS OOXML as an ISO standard?

I'm not much into how new standards are getting made at ISO, but the much discussed MS OOXML are now on track to becomming an ISO standard unless there is too many protests and problems with the format. I hope that it will get rejected by ISO because it is a bad format. The specification is HUGE and it is simply not possible for others to implement it! What good is a standard then? Furthermore, we already have a perfectly good standard called ODF which is already widely supported, but MS of course don't want to support that because it wants to keep the lock-in it's got on the marked. Here is another post about it:

The answer is to game the system. As part of this, the company has created (by itself, unlike Open Doc) a proposal for OOXML that is six thousand pages long, and then put it into the fast-track approval system with very minimal time for discussion and objection.