Some “OOXML has trouble” items from around the web

From the Financial Times, “Brussels to probe votes on Microsoft standard”:

It asked standards organisations for views on these charges and any supporting details. It was unclear on Tuesday how many standards organisations worldwide had been contacted by the Commission. However, several national organisations in Europe confirmed they had received the Commission letter. Some national bodies have admitted they are reviewing their own membership rules.

“We have to consider whether you might have to participate in the standards committee for a little more than an hour before a vote,” said Lars Flink, chief executive of the Swedish Standards Institute.

The European Commission said only that it was conducting antitrust inquiries over several aspects of Microsoft’s behaviour.

The ISO and IEC issued a press release on the BRM. It was pretty evenhanded and neutral, in my opinion, though they could have mentioned how many resolutions needed to be considered and not just those that were dealt with. That would have made clear just how little was accomplished in Geneva last week.

The Malaysia Department of Standards wasn’t very happy with the BRM meeting last week, as they said in a press release.

After 3 days, it was apparent that there would be no time to review all the items within the remaining 2 days on all substantial concerns against the Ecma standard. The 32 National Bodies, including Malaysia, were then requested to submit a vote on all the items which were not discussed at the BRM and told to vote on Ecma’s remaining dispositions to ‘Approve,’ ‘Disapprove’ or ‘Abstain.’

“Malaysia decided to vote ‘Disapprove’ to these undiscussed issues,” Fadilah elaborated, “The limitation of the BRM process clearly showed that such a task of approving this draft standard does not fit in the Fast Track process employed by Ecma International. Malaysia and other country delegations worked very hard which extended into evenings after the BRM sessions. All the technical experts from diverse backgrounds, including from Microsoft, the original proposer of the Draft, put their heads together to fix the specification. Malaysia approved the counter proposals by many National Bodies which were discussed during the BRM. Unfortunately there were just far too many to fix within the given time.”

Rob Weir has comments (surprise) on the now very clear connection between OOXML and Microsoft’s proprietary products. From the new scope for the “standard”:

The goal of this standard is, on the one hand, to represent faithfully the existing corpus of word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been produced by Microsoft Office applications (from Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office 2008 inclusive).

Isn’t this absurd? All of a sudden this product-data-format-as-faux-international-standard now needs to cover a Microsoft product that wasn’t even released when ECMA “standardized” OOXML.

Antonis Christofides, a member of the Greek delegation, noted that there was a problem with the information they were given before the BRM:

The Greek workgroup on OOXML had been handed only the Ecma Responses for Greece. It was at the BRM when we found out that we should have studied all responses, not only those for Greece. It is not clear if this is an error by Ecma or by the Greek NB, but, in both cases, we did not have the time to study one thousand responses, so there would have been no difference.

At the end of his post, Antonis describes the problems with date representations in OOXML and the deep thought necessary to get it right.

The third issue is that, while writing my proposal, I and my reviewers found 13 additional errors in the original specification. However, national bodies were not allowed to submit new comments (and rightly so, otherwise there would have been total chaos). Therefore, there was no way to submit and correct them.

This is an example, in my opinion, of how 1) there are likely many other errors in OOXML that have not been addressed, and 2) if technical items were discussed at all in the BRM, they were considered for minutes and hours instead of the days, weeks, or months that would have been normally needed to do them justice in a robust and open standards process.

Finally, here’s an example of some of the games that were played behind the scenes at the BRM from a member of the Brazilian delegation. I’m glad he got a chance to get a good night sleep after doing the entry.

Over the next few days and weeks I think we’re going to see a significant amount of righteous indignation coming to the forefront as participants of the BRM continue to speak out and as they engage with their national standards bodies back home. I encourage you to do the same as your countries make the final determination of whether Microsoft’s OOXML should become an ISO/IEC standard.

It’s now or never.