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.

Aaron Seigo on free vs proprietary software

Aaron Seigo, a prominent KDE hacker was recently interviewed about the difference between free software and proprietary software. He comments on the interview himself here. Open standards are very important in my opinion and Aaron Seigo have some really good insight into the problems you are likely to experience when using proprietary standards. You can see the interview in the link to his blog above.

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?

Yet another post about why open standards matter

What was one of the major reasons why the web became a succes? Easy: Everything you needed was freely available and it has made the web into what it is today. Of course there are problems but nothing is perfect. One of the major problems is proprietary code and formats. The major one currently is Adobe Flash. It wasn't until recently that Adobe released Flash version 9 for Linux which for most people might be good enough, but it is only available for 32bit so 64 bit users are out of luck. Of course you could argue that they are the lucky ones ;)

Now it seems the fight has increased since both Adobe and Microsoft have released various web stuff of which some of it is open source, but it is far from ideal which is very nicely summed up by Mark Pilgrim on his blog:

Springtime means conference time, which means it’s silly season on the web again. Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image. Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language, Adobe’s own runtime, Adobe’s own graphics and animation framework, Adobe’s own video and audio codecs, and Adobe’s own developer tools. You can do many things with it, but “you may not sublicense or distribute the Software. … You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. … You may not install or use the Software on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system.” It requires at least Windows XP SP 2 or Mac OS X 10.4.

Microsoft is using more or less the same restrictions, but I recommend reading the rest of his blog post/rant. The advice: Stay far away from these products. I totally agree.

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.