In case you were wondering how big 6000 pages is: OpenXML/OOXML/whatever

At various times, critics of Microsoft’s product specification-turned-ECMA-standard “OpenXML” or “OOXML” have pointed out how ridiculous it is to think that anyone other than Microsoft will ever fully and correctly implement the specification. I count myself among the critics and I may have even questioned whether Microsoft itself has or will ever implement the full specification correctly with the advertised backwards compatibility.

I think many people pass over this issue as being silly as in “why should anyone care how much specification weighs?” I think most technical people not within Microsoft’s immediate ecosystem and influence understand this issue, but others may not know what standards look like or the amount of effort it takes to implement them.

Take a look at this photo from an OOXML workshop. (Read the blog entry too.)

I don’t know what your job is, but imagine your boss came to you and said “read this, fully understand it, implement it perfectly, and make sure that it fully interoperates with the software being produced by anyone else doing the same.” Translate this statement to your own job and stare again at that photo. What do you conclude?

• You’ll have lifetime employment trying to implement the spec.
• Your boss comes from another wacko parallel universe.
• This is a joke if not a travesty.
• Your job evaluation will not be very good next year.
• There is no way you can fully do the job without reimplementing significant portions of Microsoft’s product portfolio and therefore you will run into intellectual property problems. (Don’t think that’s a problem?)
• Microsoft is trying to change the rules on what is a standard and who can implement it.

All of the above?

This is a nontrivial matter and this is serious. Remember that during the JTC1 contradiction of 30 days, reviewers had to comment on this massive spec. Many did, and many said rather negative things.

We are now in the 5 month Fast Track review and the same very negative features exist, and more are being discovered and discussed around the world by industry experts. No amount of schmoozing people and playing with procedures is going to turn this thing into a lean, clean, well designed XML specification that deserves to be an international standard rather than a documented Microsoft product specification.

To drive home this point, I’m going to give you a simple formula that may be how to guarantee your homegrown specification becomes an international standard in the future: just make it 7000 pages or more in size. Of course, someone may beat you to it with an 8000 page specification, and you might have to go to 10000.

Of course I’m being facetious here.

I hope I’m being facetious and not prescient, that is.

The choice is yours on what you do. Have a chat with people who care in your country about what is happening here. Have a chat with those who are deciding what will happen here. Have a chat with those who will have chats with others. You don’t have too much time.

This is a test case for how standards will be created in the future. We better not fail the test, in my opinion.

Also See: An “OOXML is a bad idea” blog entry compendium