Things are really hotting up again… Just when I thought we could get on with our day jobs we have Microsoft doing the biggest U-turn since - well - since the last massive U-Turn, and now we have SABS, the South African Bureau of Standards (The NB to you and me) lodging a formal appeal regarding the proceedings.

I don’t have much time today but here’s a link to the article I picked up from Google Alerts and it contains a scanned PDF of the original letter.

This will, irrespective of the outcome of the appeal process, create a quite lengthy delay to any formal publication of the standard according to the rules I’ve read before. Of course the rules have been broken, and just ignored throughout this whole fiasco so we have to wait and see.

But “Hat’s off to South Africa”.

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Wow.

Damming, direct and demeaning…

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It’s been leaked…

ISO is furthermore an irrelevance in technology standardisation.

Here’s the full file with the votes for DIS29500

Update: Hello Slashdot, and thanks Bytemark for helping us cope with the traffic!

This isn’t an April fools,  there is a PGP signed confirmation here. If you are desperate to see an April Fools article we did one of them too.We just didn’t expect to follow it so quickly with the real thing.

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After several late nights in Geneva consuming too much melted cheese and garlic infused bread, the ISO have decided that their bank account balances are just not that important to risk their organisations’ total ruin.

Listening to the hails of protest from around the globe about the skulduggery and corruption that is Microsoft, they decided, after the barrel of grappa was finally emptied, that DIS29500 should be consigned to the cesspit of excrement that already contains Microsoft and their cronies.

Only kidding! April Fool

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After many allegations of corruption, vote rigging, ballot stuffing and rule changing the votes have been cast and all that remains is the counting. The official results are arriving in dribs and drabs, prompting more suspicions of irregularities. It seemed neck and neck at first, but then as more results are announced it seems that the the efforts of the community to preserve the last shreds of democratic process may not have been enough. The stakes are high and the world media is watching closely, or as closely as they can since they are barred from entry. Freedom is at stake here, and the future of an entity with $28 billion turnover.

Hang on, world media? But that can’t be OOXML? And why $28 billion? Wikipedia puts Microsoft’s turnover at $51.12 billion.

No, the $28 billion is the GDP of Zimbabwe, who, just for the record, abstained on the OOXML vote. I hope Microsoft are happy they seem to be doing even better than Mugabe. They seem likely to be the proud owners of the worst international standard money can buy. Not sure how Zimbabwe is going to turn out, but I suspect it won’t be peaceful.

When campaigning against a planning decision about a local supermarket people march about with hand painted banners. When campaigning against a new road people build tree houses and don’t wash. When campaigning against animal testing it is traditional to handcuff yourself to the laboratory gates and be dragged away screaming. When campaigning against a redundant and commercially motivated market distorting international standard we wrote words. We held a conference. We wore suits. We handed out information to people who asked for it. Some people waved a few flags. We got branded as disorganised and unprofessional.

I hope that Microsoft won’t lobby governments to use OOXML.

I hope Governments won’t send OOXML documents to their citizens, effectively mandating the purchase of Microsoft software.

I hope the OLPC XO laptop and other Linux based pervasive low cost, low footprint computing devices won’t find themselves locked out of markets where they just don’t have the computing muscle and storage to support OOXML.

I hope that Microsoft won’t exploit the fact that their software is a definitive implementation of the standard (not a reference implementation, because it is closed and you can’t refer to it).

I hope that the Open Source community won’t divert too much effort into supporting this standard.

I hope that Microsoft actually write ODF filters to allow their software to load and save ODF documents demonstrating their belief in “choice in standards”.

I hope the Fast Track process never happens again.

I hope ISO survives, the world needs good standards and an impartial curator of them.

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Alex Brown recently blogged about a Tesco planning application in his local area. He describes the local campaign as organised and professional when compared with the noooxml campaign. I somehow don’t think that marching around the CICG wearing hi-vis jackets and waving hand painted banners made out of old sheets would have conveyed a professional image. Be thankful for small mercies Alex.
The continuing lack of coverage in the mainstream media astonishes me. This is one of the most interesting global stories I have ever followed. There are pockets of intrigue everywhere, off the top of my head I can think of interesting things that have happened in Norway, Germany, Malaysia, France, Poland, Ivory Coast, Brazil, Croatia, Kenya, Denmark, Venezula, now perhaps something weird in the UK and lets not forget Sweden where the gloves came off.
To stretch Alex’s metaphor a bit, lets imagine that the East Area Committee consisted of 23 people, 21 voted against Tesco and 2 voted for the extension (one works for Tesco, the other works for a small hand carwash business that washes cars in Tesco carparks). Then lets imagine that 20 of the No voters were then chucked out of the room and a revote held. Now lets imagine that the council is not democratically accountable and it wasn’t even your local council, but one in another country.
Now lets imagine that if the planning goes through then the Tesco will pressure the government to mandate that all groceries sold anywhere must have Tesco lables on them. (They promise that anyone can stick Tesco lables on groceries and sell them and they won’t sue, so that isn’t at all anti-competitive is it?).
Good job this is all make-believe isn’t it.

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At midnight tonight¹ the voting on the approval or not of Microsoft’s draft document specification DIS29500 will be closed. There has been more written about this process than any other standardisation in living memory.

With that in mind and irrespective of the outcome of this vote - be it pass or fail - I though I’d jot down some of my thoughts on what the repercussions may be.

• The ISO has lost all credibility. The way this particular specification’s route through ISO has been scrutinised has shown up massive flaws in the process itself; and this is the body which, rather ironically, gives us the ISO9000 series of procedural standards don’t forget. Basically it has been shown that anyone with enough money can probably, if DIS29500 gets approved, simply buy a standard.
• Microsoft have shown themselves to be more greedy, arrogant and devious than I and many others ever thought possible. However, the repercussions have only helped to make them a laughing stock and their badly written specification a laughing stock. And this whole fiasco has probably initiated their long decent into irrelevance. By attempting to force OOXML through in the way they have done, they have done yet more damage to their already tattered public perception.
• Microsoft’s puppet and henchman ECMA will feel the heat from this fiasco more than they ever anticipated I expect. If the ISO are to come out of this whole charade with any credibility at all, they will have to distance themselves from ECMA by many light years.
• The European Commission has already got it’s teeth into Microsoft’s ankles. If DIS29500 passes, then I expect they will increase their activities, aim a bit higher, and probably find many more skeletons in Microsoft’s cupboard. Which will no-doubt end in further fines, bad press and - hopefully - “encouragement” to all EU member states to avoid choosing Microsoft wherever possible.
• In the commercial sector, nothing much will change whatever the outcome of today. The tremendous growth of Open Source in the Enterprise will certainly continue and I hope spread further down the food chain into the SME/B sector, increasingly eroding Microsoft’s significance.
• On the downside, I expect Microsoft’s stuffed committees to use their position to stifle and stall development of ODF. By abstaining or voting against developments they will attempt to thwart ODF’s progress. There needs to be a concerted effort in the committees that are affected to either fill the “other-side” with friendly members or to remove Microsoft’s cronies.

That’s it. We’ll probably know the result in a day or two. I really hope that DIS29500 is rejected, but I suspect that it will pass, albeit with a small margin. If it does pass, I guess it will probably end up being worse for Microsoft in the long run. They will be chased even harder by the EU Commission, democratic governments will be scrutinised and tested at every turn to prove conformance of their IT choices with the specification - which even Microsoft can’t achieve - and the rise of free and open software will continue, probably at an enhanced pace due to the large numbers of people who have been “awoken” by this farce. Whatever the outcome just remember:

The Way Out Is Open!

¹That’s assuming they don’t change the rules yet again.

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I am a man of many business cards like many small entrepreneurs. I have cards with my name on for The Open Learning Centre, Fondoo.net, Dominux Consulting and my personal favorite card lists me as ‘Chief Story Teller’ for A Story For Bedtime. One thing in common with all of these cards is that you can trust that I actually own or work for all of these ventures.

I have not got any cards which portray me as a Vice President of IASA Malaysia though. Doug Mahugh of Microsoft has:

I wonder how often he visits the office? Maybe he telecommutes?

Kaa was drawn by the talented muralist Dan Hewer.

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Let’s join in the bug hunt [Updated: See below]

Rob Weir has produced another little gem of an analysis: to do a reasonably scientific search for errors and bugs in the OOXML specification. The idea is to see just how many errors were really caught in the original 5 month review process for the 6045 page specification, and how effective the BRM, held in Geneva a couple of weeks ago, was at fixing them.

His initial findings do not make very comforting reading…

… I’m not done with this study yet. I’m finding so many defects that recording them is slowing me down considerably. But since this is topical, I will list what I have found so far, based on the first 25 random pages, or 1/8th completion of my target 200. I’ve found 64 technical flaws. None of the 64 flaws were addressed by the BRM. Among the defects are some rather serious ones such as:

• storage of plain text passwords in database connection strings
• Undefined mappings between CSS and DrawingML
• Errors in XML Schema definitions
• Dependencies of proprietary Microsoft Internet Explorer features
• Spreadsheet functions that break with non-Latin characters
• Dependencies on Microsoft OLE method calls
• Numerous undefined terms and features

… this doesn’t look good, does it? Not only am I finding numerous errors, these errors appear to be new ones, ones not detected by the NB 5-month review, and as such were not addressed in Geneva. Since I have not come across any error that actually was fixed at the BRM, the current estimate of the defect removal effectiveness of the Fast Track process is < 1/64 or 1.5%. That is the upper bounds. Of course, this value will need to be adjusted as my study continues. However, it is starting to look like the Fast Track review was very shallow and detected only a small percentage of the errors in the DIS.

If you fancy helping Rob and the rest of the free world, he lists the page numbers (chosen at random) from part 4 of DIS29500 that should be examined in detail for errors and such like. Here’s just a few of the page numbers (out of 200) to check:

… 1102, 1611, 3016, 2646, 3083, 5105, 747, 1142, 2596, 845, 626, 4047, 1415, 5143, 3997

The fact that in examining just the first few pages he finds numerous NEW errors indicates yet again, that this specification should never have been Fast Tracked in the first place and is just simply not in a fit state to be declared an ISO standard.

It really does make me wonder how certain National Bodies can be even remotely sincere when they decide to approve such a badly written specification.

[Update: In the few scant hours since Rob's article was originally published, go and check the comments section! Even if you aren't a software engineer, the errors and inconsistencies being reported are simply mind boggling. How on earth can this specification be approved as an international standard when it is just so bad?]

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I know there has been a great deal of written commentary about why OOXML should or should not become an ISO standard. Just look back though this blog for many of them

Recently however, Rob Weir has documented an incredibly simple, telling and fascinatingly descriptive demonstration of exactly why OOXML is such utter crap and should never become a standard in its current format. He shows how a simple formatting rule looks when saved using OOXML or ODF* based applications. See Rob’s table and comments below:

* ODF is the ISO approved standard for document formats and is used by many platform independent applications such as OpenOffice.org and KOffice.

… let’s take a look at how OOXML and ODF represent a staple of document formats: text color and alignment. I created six documents: word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics, in OOXML and ODF formats. In each case I entered one simple string “This is red text”. In each case I made the word “red” red, and right aligned the entire string. The following table shows the representation of this formatting instruction in OOXML and ODF, for each of the three application types:

Format	Text Color	Text Alignment
OOXML Text	<w:color w:val=”FF0000″/>	<w:jc w:val=”right”/>
OOXML Sheet	<color rgb=”FFFF0000″/>	<alignment horizontal=”right”/>
OOXML Presentation	<a:srgbClr val=”FF0000″/>	<a:pPr algn=”r”/>
ODF Text	<style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end” />
ODF Sheet	<style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end”/>
ODF Presentation	<style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end”/>

The results speak for themselves.

What is the engineering justification for this horror? I have no doubt that this accurately reflects the internals of Microsoft Office, and shows how these three applications have been developed by three different, isolated teams. But is this a suitable foundation for an International Standard? Does this represent a reasonable engineering judgment? ODF uses the W3C’s XSL-FO vocabulary for text styling, and uses this vocabulary consistently. OOXML’s representation, on the other hand, appear incompatible with any deliberate design methodology.

I fear that before we can tackle harmonization of ODF and OOXML, we will first need to harmonize OOXML with itself!

I love how convoluted and completely indecipherable the OOXML representations are; and they are all different depending on which application you use! It’s laughable really.

Honestly, how on earth can the US NB, for example, have just announced their decision to vote yes to OOXML unless they have been thoroughly corrupted - as have so many other of the ISO National bodies and sub-committees involved in this whole sorry saga.

To my mind there will be two losers if OOXML becomes IS-29500:

• Us - That’s all of us as consumers and users of electronic documents
• ISO - They have already lost a great deal of respect and credibility. If OOXML passes they will have none left. They will become an irrelevance in technology standards at least.

I can see the IETF (The body responsible for much of what has made the Internet work) becoming a far more important standards setter going forward…

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