OOXML loses a battle [LWN.net]

OOXML loses a battle

Posted Sep 6, 2007 7:28 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)
Parent article: OOXML loses a battle

Actually, if all the criticisms where fairly resolved, I wouldn't have much problem with the standard being accepted. There's no snowballs chance in hell of that though.

The proposal is 6000 pages long, there are over 10.000 comments to it. Many of them duplicate, but even so sorting trough and adressing these, even minimally, will take *much* longer than from now until february. Inside of a one-week meeting is beyond laughable, that's literally not even enough time to read the proposal once.

(Well, if you can read and comprehend technical standards at a pace of 50 pages an hour, 7 days a week, 17 hours a day, then you'll have managed reading it, you won't even have started *correcting* it or even *glancing* at any of the comments though)

I predict the following happens:

A few smaller issues are resolved.

Another dozen countries upgrade their membership to P

A handful of high-profile P-members change their vote from no to yes.

The proposal is accepted as a "standard".

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OOXML loses a battle

Posted Sep 6, 2007 11:33 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

>The proposal is accepted as a "standard".

And so, what? Who has the time, interest, or resources to deal with such a Melvillian disaster?

OOXML loses a battle

Posted Sep 7, 2007 0:48 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

And so, what?

The "so what" is that if ISO adopts it as a standard, when citizens of various states and countries demand that their governments use open standards for government documents, Microsoft will be able to say that their software does so, even though it doesn't actually provide most of the benefits an open standard should provide.

I wouldn't have any problem with OOXML if it was a reasonable standard, but it's not. It's just a way of translating their old binary blob data format into nearly equally impenetrable XML. Many reviewers have said that the spec is full of ambiguities. As noted in the article, the chance of anyone else really supporting OOXML is nil.

There's no reason that an open, standardized document format needs to support every random, bizarre feature that Microsoft has invented over the last 25 years. It should be quite possible and manageable for a working group to define a set of extensions to ODF to support the things that Microsoft has complained are missing from it. (Most of them, anyhow; it's not clear that all of the things Microsoft wants are reasonable.)