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.

Well done Microsoft...NOT!

Before the vote on the MS OOXML document standard in ISO, a lot of countries suddenly joined to be able to vote. Nearly all of them voted in favour of OOXML, a clear sign that Microsoft played a major role. As most people know, it didn't help them since the voted ended up being no anyway. It doesn't end there though, since all these new members only joined to vote on this one standard, they have not voted since. This creates a big unfortunate problem:

The result is that a very important committee has, in the words of its Secretariat Manager in frequent pleas to the non-responsive members, "ground to a halt."

Microsoft has repeatedly said that they care a lot about standards, so Microsoft - please fix this big mess you've made!

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.

How much is 6000 pages?

6000 pages is what Microsofts OOXML specification fills and some Czech guy decided to cut down a forest or two and print it all out!

BTW - with the help of Dan, Jirka and Filip, we were able to "print" the complete OOXML specification, bind it in six volumes (1000 sheets per volume) and we brought it with us to the workshop. It was a bit heavy, but I was lucky enough to find parking place in very short distance to ČNI offices (without the knowledge of where the offices exactly are, in the centre of Prague, I still can't believe it ;-) - have you ever seen 75 cm tall "tower" from paper? We have many photos from the workshop and will publish them as soon as possible, so you'll be able to see it soon.

[...]

I have read approx. 200 pages of the specification and I decided to stop, because it is dangerous. The ideas presented in various parts of the specification (like two ways to represent the date - one of them representing dates between 1900 and 20000 and another one to represent dates between 1904 and 20000 where the second one is a complete subset of the first one!) are dangerous to the mental health of the reader. The innovative method of storing the language code (e.g. the decimal integer 58380 into two digit hexadecimal number) is also worth a world-wide patent...

I simply can't believe that developers and or TC45 members from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress actually read the final document. I can't believe it. If I ever write such document, I surely won't sign it by my name. Why?

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.

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.