[Wylug-discuss] MS Office XML and ISO Standardisation

[Dave Fisher]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 01:47:38PM -0000, ALLEN, David wrote:
> I have been following this discussion but have not got involved because
> it is an area I know very little about, so maybe someone can answer my
> questions, and yes, I am just being a "Devil's Advocate".
> 
> The key question is "does it matter?". 

Yes, it *really* does.

> I am as big a fan of Open Office
> as the rest of you and if a standard is developed which allows open
> office to work with office does it matter who publishes it? 

I don't give jot about who publishes a proposed standard.

Nor do I care *which* applications implement it. 

The key practical issues are about whether or not the standard is
sufficiently:

  1. Open enough, for a range of different vendors/developers to
     implement it.

  2. Clear/unamibiguos enough, for different implementations to be fully
     interoperable.

  3. Extensible enough, for future improvements to be made to the
     original standard.

The ECMA standard for MS Office XML (OOXML) does not meet any of 
these criteria.

The massively hyped ODF-OOXML translator that MS recently put up on
sourceforge 'allows open office to work with office', but that is
nothing like saying 'to work *reliably*'.

Nor is can reliability be judged solely on technical criteria.

Windows worked perfectly well with DR-DOS, but hardly anyone used DR-DOS,
because they didn't have confidence in its ability to do so reliably ...
not least because MS put a nag screen into Windows telling users that it
couldn't be relied upon!

I, for one, could not trust the MS translator to work reliably, unless I
was confident that the OOXML standard was well enough defined for
another vendor could produce an alternative translator which proved that
all data (and preferrably formatting too) was preserved.

> Or is it
> that the standard does not include all the required info?

That is certainly one of the most important technical points.

> The longer this procedure goes on the more chance Microsoft will give up
> and use their closed format which has done them well over many years;
> after all the only company I can see to loose with this (or any) new
> standard is Microsoft!

I think that your perception is quite wrong about this.

MS didn't get into the formal standardisation business because they wanted to.

They were *forced* into it by governments, who need to know that data
they create today will allways be fully accessible and recoverable,
because (in the last resort) someone can use the standard to develop a
reader/writer that can be trusted.

The issue of data integrity and recoverability is simpy too important
for governments to cave in on, no matter how powerful or ubiquitous
Microsoft is.

Once again, this issue is *not* about any of these things:

    1. Microsoft
    2. Microsoft Office
    3. Open Office

It's about DATA (sorry for shouting :-).

Dave