OOXML is already obsolete.
This is a great piece of analysis of the status of DIS29500. Included here in it’s entirety, courtesy of the Free Software Foundation Europe.
DIS-29500: Deprecated before use?
[Also available as PDF (1.4M)] When ECMA submitted MS-OOXML as ECMA-376 to ISO for fast-track approval, several countries1 criticised overlap with the existing ISO standard ISO/IEC 26300:2006, the Open Document Format (ODF).In its February 2007 response, ECMA admits that MS-OOXML addresses the same high-level goals of representing documents, spreadsheets and presentations as ISO/IEC 26300:2006, but maintains that the standards meet different user requirements. This is clarified by ECMA’s statement that the explicit design goal for ECMA-376 is to preserve idiosyncrasies from Microsoft’s proprietary legacy file formats. This statement was included in the ECMA response on January 2008 to 113 comments2 made by national bodies during the 2 September 2007 ballot, as well as its 14 January 2008 proposed Disposition of Comments.Considering that alleged preservation of idiosyncrasies is the stated reason for the entire DIS-29500 ISO process, FSFE considers it worthwhile to investigate this claim in greater depth.The preservation of idiosyncrasies is a questionable reason for an international standard. The goal of standardisation is to provide consistency and to remove idiosyncrasies, not to perpetuate them. By aiming to preserve idiosyncrasies, the best achievable outcome is good documentation of incompatibilities. When it became clear that the main purpose of DIS-29500 was the documentation of idiosyncrasies, the process should have stopped. That it did not indicates a lack of internal structures in the fast-track procedures to prevent abuse of the international standardisation system.
Analysis of DIS-29500 by the national standardisation bodies quickly revealed that information to preserve proprietary legacy formats was referenced in the specification, but the specification of these formats was missing. So although the preservation of idiosyncrasies was the declared design goal and the reason for the creation of DIS-29500, this information is missing from the 6000+ page specification.
Microsoft recently deprecated its legacy file formats and as part of its response to criticism in the DIS-29500 process announced to finally make documentation of these formats available under the Open Specification Promise just before the BRM. Although there will not be enough time for analysis of comprehensiveness, quality and fidelity of that documentation for purpose of the BRM, it seems likely that Microsoft will declare this a satisfactory response to the question of missing specification in DIS-29500. It would however be premature for national bodies to accept this assertion in blind faith – in particular as publication will take place outside the ISO scope and is subject to all legal concerns regarding the Open Specification Promise.
Simultaneously, ECMA addresses this in Response 34 of its proposed Disposition of Comments by removing all references to idiosyncrasies from the specification and placing them in a newly formed Annex for deprecated information. With the removal of this information from the DIS-29500, the design goal of MS-OOXML can no longer be met. The entire specification has therefore effectively become obsolete.
Analysis has shown before that MS-OOXML is covering the same functional space as ISO/IEC 26300:2006 and is unnecessary. It was ECMA which insisted on backward-oriented documentation of idiosyncrasies being a sufficient motive for ISO to ignore the good practice of forward-oriented standardisation. But even by ECMAs own criteria the rationale for DIS-29500 has been deprecated.
In essence: Response 34 of the proposed Disposition of Comments effectively contradicts and invalidates Response 31, which cites preservation of idiosyncrasies as the primary design goal and reason for DIS-29500. It also invalidates ECMAs February 2007 response to similar criticism.
No implementation of DIS-29500
Because there is no justification for the standardisation of DIS-29500, its approval places an unnecessary cost on competition in the IT sector, resulting in artificially higher prices for end users.
Furthermore, the ongoing standardisation process increasingly modifies what started out as a documentation effort for Microsoft’s current default file format. The implementation is already being shipped for some time, and updating the product with the various improvements made to DIS-29500 would result in incompatibility of next year’s version of Microsoft Office with the files written by today’s version. Microsoft itself maintained this as an argument against these suggested changes during the international review phase.
With more than 2,000 pages of proposed Disposition of Comments and Microsoft as the only party with commercial interest in DIS-29500, it seems likely that we will see significant differences between the DIS-29500 specification and the MS-OOXML implementation, which will nonetheless claim implementation of DIS-29500.
Verification of this claim and ensuring fidelity of written data against the DIS-29500 will be an extremely costly exercise for all users of MS-OOXML. Because there will only be one alleged full implementation available, users will need to carefully compare their binary files against the DIS-29500 specification to protect fidelity of their data.
Microsoft and ECMA are in fact already using this strategy in their current responses to criticism by listing applications that seek compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 as implementations of DIS-29500. Even where not sub-contracted by Microsoft, these applications certainly use DIS-29500 for guidance on how to implement the current Microsoft file format, but their benchmark for success is not faithful implementation of DIS-29500, it is binary compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007.
It should be noted that a similar situation could never arise with ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF) because it already has several independent implementations. Files written by one application need to be readable by all others, otherwise there is a problem with fidelity in at least one of the applications. Because there is a wide range of applications and users for ODF, such incompatibilities will be detected easily. A diverse user and application base is the best insurance against creeping legacy lock-in.
Remember ECMA-234?
There is no need in the marketplace for ECMA-376, the specification does not deliver the promised preservation of idiosyncrasies, and there is no commitment by Microsoft to implement the outcome of the DIS-29500 process faithfully for a meaningful period of time. Does anyone remember ECMA-234, the “Application Programming Interface for Windows (APIW)”?
This ECMA standard was also put forward as standardisation of the Windows operating system with much the same promises that are being made for ECMA-376 today. It was deprecated just after ECMA-234 was finally standardised when Microsoft published Windows 95, which completely ignored the existence of ECMA-234. Microsoft’s product decision made ECMA-234 obsolete and turned the entire specification into a huge waste of collective effort. Without a binding commitment by Microsoft to faithfully implement the outcome of DIS-29500, the current process is promising to go down the same route.
It seems that ISO, its national standardisation bodies and hundreds of standardisation experts around the world are essentially being used for a rather costly product marketing exercise. The question is whether ISO should allow itself to be used in this way.
If it becomes common practice to standardise for promotional effect and then ignore, ISO might find itself deprecated in the area of Information and Communication Technologies.
FSFE would consider this too high a price to pay for approval of DIS-29500.
Related reading
- Six questions to national standardisation bodies
- The Converter Hoax
- Questions for Microsoft on Open Formats
[1] Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.
[2] BR-0002, CL-0057, CL-0058, CL-0059, CL-0060, CL-0061, CL-0062, CL-0063, CL-0064, CL-0065, CL-0066, CL-0067, CL-0068, CL-0069, CL-0070, CL-0071, CL-0073, CL-0074, CL-0075, CL-0076, CL-0077, CL-0078, CL-0079, CL-0080, CL-0081, CL-0082, CL-0083, CL-0084, CL-0085, CL-0086, CL-0087, CL-0089, CL-0090, CO-0081, CO-0082, DE-0114, DK-0004, DK-0005, GB-0136, GB-0137, GB-0138, GB-0140, GB-0141, GB-0142, GB-0143, GB-0144, GB-0145, GB-0146, GB-0147, GB-0148, GB-0149, GB-0150, GB-0151, GB-0152, GB-0153, GB-0154, GB-0155, GB-0156, GB-0157, GB-0158, GB-0159, GB-0160, GB-0161, GB-0162, GB-0163, GB-0164, GB-0165, GB-0166, GB-0167, GB-0168, GB-0169, GB-0170, GR-0094, GR-0095, IR-0008, IR-0010, IR-0011, NZ-0015, NZ-0016, NZ-0017, NZ-0018, NZ-0019, NZ-0020, NZ-0021, NZ-0022, NZ-0023, NZ-0024, NZ-0025, NZ-0026, NZ-0027, NZ-0028, NZ-0029, NZ-0031, NZ-0032, NZ-0033, NZ-0034, NZ-0035, NZ-0036, NZ-0037, NZ-0038, NZ-0039, NZ-0040, NZ-0041, NZ-0042, NZ-0043, NZ-0044, NZ-0045, NZ-0046, NZ-0047, NZ-0048, US-0096, US-0097, US-0098
OOXML: Feeling the heat
Things are really starting to warm up now the BRM is just a couple of weeks away and the deadline for the NBs to change their vote (any way they choose) approaches at the end of March.
Several rumours of more shenanigans have been floating around over the past week or so and one has solidified.
Rick Jelliffe, almost legendary in his dealings with Microsoft, and a staunch supporter of the proposed format (ECMA-376) with almost nae a criticism to emanate from his mouth or fingers, has confirmed that:
1. He is being paid by ECMA/Microsoft [Update: Istvan Sebestyen said in the first comment below that “Ecma International is in no way paying this gentleman”]
2. He is representing Standards Australia (SA) at the forthcoming BRM and is 50% of their delegation.
How did Australia vote in September you may wonder? They abstained… Rather strangely you might think. Most of the major developed economies, found hundreds of flaws with ECMA’s original proposal and all Australia could come up with by way of clarification was:
“Due to lack of support and stakeholder commitment to ongoing engagement in the International Standards development process in this area it was not viable to convene an appropriate technical committee.”
And 20 or so rather trivial comments.
And now they have a strongly biased supporter of Microsoft who is working for Microsoft, acting on their behalf at the BRM. I wonder what voting policy he will be recommending to SA on his return?
The other area of debate recently has been just how open Microsoft’s OSP really is… Many legal experts are concluding that it is just too obscure and opaque to be worth anything until it has been tested in court. Who would like to go first?
Here is a review of some the issues surrounding the OSP and what it means for developers and implementers of – what should be – a publicly open and internationally approved ISO/IEC standard.
And finally, and rather amusingly, Martin Bekkelund; has done some testing of Microsoft’s claims that OOXML works on several Apple products. Unfortunately it appears as thought they have been somewhat “economical with the truth” [Surely not! Microsoft?]…
“I do not own a license for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, and I will not buy one either. It might be possible to open documents produced by Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac with iWork ‘08, iPhone or NeoOffice, but that is irrelevant. One of the major points with interoperability, is vendor independence. If I have to buy a license for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, Microsoft has succeeded in creating a standard so difficult — not to say impossible — to implement, that users will have to buy Microsoft’s software.
As a final statement, I would like to point out that the allegations on OOXML beeing implemented in iWork ‘08, iPhone and NeoOffice are wrong.”
Do you really want OOXML as an international standard?
OOXML: In Trouble Down Under
ITWire are carrying a news story from a couple of individuals involved with Standards New Zealand (SNZ). [Updated]
It would seem that some of SNZ’s advisers aren’t happy to say the least:
Don Christie, president of the New Zealand Open Source Society and a member of the Standards NZ (SNZ) OOXML Advisory Committee, says: “It is the view of the NZOSS that Microsoft and ECMA have failed to provide quality responses to SNZ comments. Even where they have supposedly ‘agreed’ with the comment the actual resolution has either introduced more/different problems or simply made the original item ‘unspecified’.”
Please ensure that your local NB is aware of their position after the SNZ carried out an excellent technical review and analysis during the initial fast-track review period. As we know already there are many NBs (National Bodies) which, surprisingly, upgraded their status just before September’s vote and, rather amazingly for a 6000+ page specification found no fault whatsoever and voted YES with no comments.
A comment from Franco Merletti on Andy Updegrove’s blog summed up this very well:
Maybe they can ask some people at the ISO National Bodies of Cyprus island, Jamaica island, Malta island, Cote d Ivoire and Lebanon, what caused their “sudden” motivation to ask (and get) ISO JTC1 P-member status a few days previous to DIS 29500 September/2007 ballot closing…
… just to vote unconditionally yes to +6000 pages of a notably flawed specification ( which until now achieved an outstanding mark of +3000 observations and +2000 quick-fixes/deletions/deprecations with only a few months of a rushed review and which final proposed text remains undefined ) generated in less than 1 year in a closed, not traceable nor accountable process at an ECMA Technical committee formed and lead by Microsoft.
I wonder how much technical review meetings took place at this national bodies to review DIS 29500 ( any minutes of this meetings? ) and what caused their unprecedented interest in Document Description and Processing Languages standards related to structured markup languages (specifically the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML)) in the areas of information description, processing and association ( ISO JTC1 SC34 area of interest ).
I don’t want to be disrespectful with this countries, but i don’t consider standards and standardisations as a “game to win” ( it seems that some corporations have this point of view ).
I see here an amazing lack of respect, because many responsible JTC1 P-members ( with background and expertise in this field ) did a lot of *hard* work to review DIS 29500 to decide if it has the technical merits to be an ISO fast-tracked standard ( i.e: UK BSI [1], USA Incits/V1 [2], Japan, Canada [3], China, India, France [4], etc. ) and this other national bodies just seems to be pawns in the game, leaving the technical work aside.
Wake up ISO, wake up end users ! demand quality in standardisation ! Money shouldn’t buy standards.
franco merletti
[1] http://www.xmlopen.org/ooxml-wiki/index.php/DIS_29500_Comments
[2] http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/v1mail/
[3] https://forums.scc.ca/forums/scc/dispatch.cgi/public/docProfile/100009/d20070504104953/No/t100009.htm
[4] http://iso-vote.com/afnor.html
The NBs that care so much, and have worked so hard to try and create a usable specification from this mess should be applauded. But their work should also be explained and reviewed by those NBs that found little or no fault with the initial proposal.
If they are struggling with the enormity of the task, we have established dis29500.org to help them. Take a look and help to verify ECMA’s responses.
ECMA, the organisation responsible for actually pushing this standard through ISO, have yet to release the new specification, based on the analysis and examination of the original 3522 comments submitted. The new proposal will be significantly longer than the original and is supposed to be voted on before the end of March. There is NO WAY that a comprehensive review of such a large specification can be done in this time frame. ECMA should withdraw their application fully and re-submit when they think they have a decent proposal. And they should not try to fast-track it either.
Christie says that responses have often been of poor quality. “If we were to extrapolate (the) poor quality of responses we have seen to the 54 Standard NZ comments to those of all the other NBs then we can only conclude that the result is probably a worse mess than the document we reviewed last August. Of course, that is conjecture because ECMA have yet to release the revised document, despite having made assurances that they would have done by now.”
How can any non-partisan NB vote unreservedly yes when there are standards bodies with exemplary reputations having found so many errors and inconsistencies in the same specification?
ISO Standards are for the benefit of us all. They should and must not be used for the benefit of one company so as to retain it’s Monopoly. Vote NO.
Should ISO throw out OOXML?
According to several reports this morning, the EU (god bless ’em) are digging deeply into Microsoft’s attempts to steamroller OOXML through the ISO last September.
As part of its battle against proponents of ODF – which was approved as the ISO standard last year – Redmond swelled the ranks of standards bodies with Microsoft allies in the hope of ratifying its Office file format as the default standard for international use.
Microsoft had tried to fast-track OOXML via Ecma International, the group which originally rubber-stamped the format. However, a vote of the draft (DIS 29500) failed to gain sufficient approval last September.
According to the Wall Street Journal, EU officials are now considering if Microsoft’s actions – which came under fire from critics who accused the firm of underhand tactics and even vote-rigging – were illegal.
The timing of this release couldn’t really be better for the “no campaign“. Just a few weeks before the NBs (National Standards Bodies) meet to discuss the proposed resolutions to the 3522 comments raised against the specification, this can only help to fuel the concern of many that Microsoft are endeavouring to push through not just simply a flawed standard, but one whose sole intention is to prolong their lock-in of customers (and so maintain their Office cash cow) with proprietary and binary storage methods and Intellectual Monopoly.
Please let your national body know that the EU obviously has some serious concerns about Microsoft’s intentions with their OOXML proposition.
Personally, I think enough is enough. The ISO should drop this whole fiasco like a ton of bricks, throw out dis29500 and force Microsoft, and their puppet ECMA, to go through the normal processes and abide by the normal rules. Just like Adobe did with PDF…
Thanks to Matt Assay’s blog where I first read about this.
[Update] Here’s something I found quite amusing whilst getting the urls for this item. If you search Google for “no ooxml” see what the ad is that crops up? I’m not going to spoil your fun, but please click on it! 😉
OOXML: Your flexible file format
I noted this post on Bob Sutor’s blog and thought it definately warranted promoting.
As he says this should be obvious to everyone (it certainly is to BECTA here in the UK) but, just perhaps, some people are being misled into thinking that OXML is OOXML is OOXML….
Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with long term interoperability.
Bob goes on to say:
First, the “official†ECMA OOXML that was submitted to ISO is not what Microsoft implements in Office 2007. So unless your application reverse-engineered Office 2007’s support, you’ve got interoperability problems right there.
Second, the ECMA spec is over 6000 pages long, there were thousands of comments, and thousands of pages of proposed resolutions to those comments. And that’s just from Microsoft. Others will go to the BRM with different proposals, and further ideas may come up there. Not everything may be addressed at the BRM.
Nobody has the vaguest idea what OOXML will look like in February or even whether it will be in any sort of stable condition by the end of March. Major features may be deprecated. Completely different solutions may be proposed. And at the end, the whole thing may be rejected, just as it was done in September.
So that OOXML format that you are saving files in right now is dead and will be replaced, unless Microsoft decides it won’t bother implementing what comes out of the ISO process. Indeed, if the ballot finally fails, I’m not sure what Microsoft will do with all the suggested comments.
Nice one Bob. I thought this was pretty obvious too but it can’t hurt to explain it to the public. Microsoft certainly won’t.
A REALLY BIG day for OOXML [Updated (or is it deprecated?)]
Today the 14th January 2008 is actually quite a BIG day. Two things have happened that are not directly related but may well, ultimately, have a very positive cumulative effect for us all.
The first thing is ECMA must present, to the voting bodies (NBs) of ISO that will decide the fate of DIS29500, their deliberations and suggested alterations on the 3522 comments which were given during the fast track review period last year.
Update: It has come to my attention that ECMA has issued the dispositions for all 3522 comments. As they are password protected and not for public consumption I couldn’t possibly have seen them but from what I can gather, large parts of the OOXML specification have been moved into a deprecated annex. How long before Office 2007 supports what is effectively a new DIS29500 remains to be seen. If of course, Microshaft decide to bother that is.
That the proposed specification should never have been fast-tracked (it was not ready, full of errors and inconsistencies and worse), or that Microsoft tried to bribe and corrupt their way through the ISO processes to ensure that it passed (and it still failed because it was so bad), is now neither here nor there.
There is to be a meeting in Geneva next month called a BRM (Ballot Resolution Meeting) where members will participate in the review of ECMA’s suggestions for amendments and changes to DIS29500. After the meeting (which only lasts 5 days) the members will have 30 days to decide if they should change their September vote.
One can only begin to imagine what will be going on in the countries that have been Microsoft’s puppet before and those which have so far resisted the borg’s influence. There are already stories of high skulduggery appearing.
The blogosphere is already starting to hot up again for this topic. Here’s a few good links to get you in the mood for what is to come.
Rob Weir (An Antic Disposition),
No OOXML
Groklaw
Open Forum Europe
The second event to have occurred today which may well have a bearing is the EU’s decision to start two more investigations into Microsoft’s anti-competitive practises and more specifically:
The European Commission has decided to initiate two formal antitrust investigations against Microsoft Corp concerning two separate categories of alleged infringements of EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82). The first case where proceedings have been opened is in the field of interoperability in relation to a complaint by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS). The second area where proceedings have been opened is in the field of tying of separate software products following inter alia a complaint by Opera.
The Interoperability investigation is explained thus:
In the complaint by ECIS, Microsoft is alleged to have illegally refused to disclose interoperability information across a broad range of products, including information related to its Office suite, a number of its server products, and also in relation to the so called .NET Framework. The Commission’s examination will therefore focus on all these areas, including the question whether Microsoft’s new file format Office Open XML, as implemented in Office, is sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products.
So they want to find out if their new file format (OOXML) is actually implementable by anyone else or is just a smokescreen to make them appear to be playing ball. As usual Groklaw does some in-depth analysis of these issues (where you will always get a good read).
Oh Goody. This will keep us all busy for a while…
And who knows, the EU and the ISO might just both get it right 🙂
