HP Pavilion dv5t, $649.99ISO: Office Open XML ratified as standard
As expected, the ISO on Wednesday announced that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been approved as a standard, marking the end a long and sometimes contentious path.
The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued a press release with the details of a vote that showed Open XML receiving 75 percent approval and 14 percent disapproval. It needed two-thirds approval and not more than 25 percent disapproval to pass.
The effort to make Open XML an ISO standard did not pass a ballot in September, which precipitated a follow-on Ballot Resolution Meeting in February where, after redundancies were eliminated, over 1,000 issues were considered, according to the ISO.
Following the BRM, delegates from participants had the option of changing their position from No or Abstain to Yes--something that enough did to have the effort pass.
Microsoft originally submitted the Open XML file formats to standards organization Ecma International in 2005. Ecma then proposed the specification to ISO in its Fast Track process, which many considered to be too fast for a complicated specification.
ISO standards status means that software that uses Open XML, notably Microsoft's Office products, will be more attractive to governments and large corporate customers that prefer to purchase ISO-certified goods.
It also means that development of the specification will be done through the ISO, which counts members from over 100 countries. There were 87 countries which participated in the Open XML vote.
Microsoft and other software companies that support Open XML in their products, such as Apple and Novell, are expected to conform to the standard as it changes over time.
The entire endeavor was opposed by many, although certainly not all, open-source advocates who feared that standards status would give Microsoft more market power.
The run-up to the vote was marked by intense lobbying from Microsoft, IBM, and their business partners.
There were reports of what have been called irregularities in the vote which ended Saturday. The head of the committee which formed Standards Norway's position lodged a complaint saying that the yes vote did not reflect the opposition of the majority of the committee.
However, ISO spokesperson Roger Frost on Tuesday said that the organization has not received a complaint from its Norwegian ISO member, referring the matter to Standards Norway.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.
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aren't the first to the table, and the OOXML format is both less
flexible and more complex than it's predecessors (for example,
the ISO standard for OOXML has things in it like the attribute
"useMSWord95LikeBehavior" without telling you what that
means). Certainly, there were technically superior XML office
document formats that preceded XML that didn't make everyone
switch.
However, the governments wouldn't tell the citizens not to use a
format, EU or otherwise. The only concern for the government is
accessibility of the document contents. Older binary formats
made the contents inaccessible as the applications that dealt
with them deprecated them or were abandoned.
OOXML may still not solve that problem entirely, since it
dispenses with the notion of document format retention (some
elements of the format are undefined, so different applications
or versions of an application may render the page differently),
and it still has legal encumberances (namely, parts of the format
are dependent on MS patents and MS asserts a claim of
ownership on the document -- the representation, not the
content itself). For government purposes, it still has
shortcomings that make it technically undesirable, but it does
have the advantage of preserving most of the information in an
accessible fashion.
The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued a press release with the details of a vote that showed Open XML receiving 75 percent approval and 14 percent disapproval. It needed two-thirds approval and not more than 25 percent disapproval to pass".
Still yet not not addressed are these very important issues contained in this 1998 Lotus Development Corporation communication which are as follows:
Re: Concerning the issues with 1-2-3 that are talked about in the documentation you gave me, most of the issues are related to converting files between older and newer versions of product and converting documents between Lotus and Microsoft. Anytime a file is saved backwards or saved with an older file format than the format the file was created under, such as saving a 1-2-3 , 97 file for Windows 95 into a WK1 format for DOS, then naturally we are expected to loose certain features due to technology and features that are present now that were not present 8 - 10 years ago. Similarly, if we try to convert a file from Lotus into Excel or Excel into Lotus, due to differences in the products not every feature will be converted perfectly with the file filters that are available. Both Lotus and Microsoft create similar spreadsheet programs; however, there are several differences in both programs and these differences will remain to distinguish the products apart. We do try to design conversion filters that will allow as much of the file formats as possible to be exchanged and converted without disrupting the actual file design and format.
In one of your letters you made mention of the @IRR and @ERR functions in the 1-2-3 product. By design the @IRR (notably "absent" in Open Office) will calculate the Internal Rate of Return; where the @ERR is used in conjunction with other formulas, posted was an "ERR" showing an error was received in the calculations. As far as I can see in the program I cannot find an @ERR function that will allow us to calculate an Economic Rate of Return"
And, to "crown" it all, "The CONCORDE" is still on the ground (and, the U.S. economy is still in tatters)! So, the question is: When will the "so-called" decision-makers at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ever learn. :-(
Read the subject line. Now, let the journey to "GOLEM" begin. (Sound the trumpets, sound the harps....)
http://www.win2biz.com/comfar/default.htm
getting kickbacks from M$ is crying a little today. The ISO just sold
it's soul on a filthy street corner like a cheap diseased prostitute
and you call that a good thing?
There's no OOXML implementation yet (remember, even MS
doesn't support OOXML as presented in the standard). The
standard for office documents doesn't specify that the layout of
the document be preserved (for example, rather than say "put
block of text at position X,Y", the standard has things like
"layout text like Word 95 would have"). And the standard itself is
encumbered by patents that, technically speaking, prohibit
implementation by organizations other than Microsoft.
Basically, it's a small will, in that it's possible to write documents
with formatting in XML that can be read by future versions of
Microsoft Office, but you can't read them without permission
from MS, and you can only see the original formatting with help
from MS. It's only a boon if you're hedging your bets on
Microsoft going bankrupt and Office being abandoned, and
that's not happening any time soon.
Read The Subject Line.
Thank you.
Commander_Spock and Crew.
- Join us in producing the next standard
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by fokwp
April 2, 2008 9:37 AM PDT
- Dear Microsoft Customers:
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See all 21 Comments >>Our Level II ISO standard is now under development, and we expect it will offer even *greater* consumer choice than our original version, and be even more open, transparent, and useful to the open standards community! Those of you who wish to have input into the development of this standard, and/or wish to have software in the pipeline that can handle our Level II file structure once we release it from our proprietary labs and out for approval, may join our "Early Open Access" development program just by signing a non-disclosure and paying a quite reasonable fee!