On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 11:53:15PM +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
> |
> | ACTION: Behdad to contact Jody about the ECMA membership application and
> | find a good candidate from Abiword to attend. Behdad to work on getting
> | a press release for our membership.
>
> >From above, I don't see how the community was informed that we would
> support someone to discuss OOXML. I noted that we joined ECMA (I viewed
> it as freedesktop 'make standards' work).. but I am now really sorry I
> missed the rest of the thread.
>
> My initial reaction to the article ranged from "I never heard that we
> have a representative there -- it is not true" to "wtf wasn't this
> mentioned somewhere".
That is quite unfortunate. I'm sorry for the miscommunication. It
was not my intent to obfuscate the issue. Being part of the process
immerses one in a cornucopia of acronyms. After a while they become
part of the scenery.
ECMA = European Computer Manufacturers Association
http://www.ecma-international.org
An umbrella organisation for creating standards.
TC45 = Technical Committee number 45 of ECMA
Responsible for the specification of Microsoft's XML based file
format which they've name 'Office Open XML' or OOX/OOXML.
That name irritates the piss out of me, and I prefer the more
accurate 'Microsoft Office Open XML' or MOOX.
On the other hand it makes for lots of tongue twisting fun as MS
reps end up saying Open Office XML frequently. After 1.5 years
of work on the _documentation_ (not the content) of the new MS
format the committee sent a draft to the ECMA general assembly.
ECMA-376 = the id given to the draft of TC45's work that was
approved by the ECMA general assembly and sent onwards to ISO
for consideration on 'Fast Track' acceptance which would have
potentially made it an official standard with less review than
most standards.
ISO = International Standards Organisation
The mother of all standards umbrellas. Made up of various
'National Bodies' (NBs) and of few organisations.
ISO/IEC DIS 29500 : The name given to ECMA-376
OASIS = Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards
http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php
Yet another umbrella organisation.
This one is responsible to mentoring ODF (I assume you know that
one :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------
History
In Mar of 2005 Novell allowed me to join this TC to help
evaluate MOOX, and if possible to request enough information to
allow it to be implemented if desired. Novell was already a
corporate member of ECMA which also hosts the C# and javascript
(aka ecmascript) specs. At the same time I was also a member
of the ODF committee, and the ODF Formula subcommittee.
I ended up acting as an informal liaison between the
organisations but neither was especially interested in
harmonisation, or sharing.
The initial TC45 meetings were somewhat tentative. MS was
worried that we had join to sabotage or delay the
standardisation effort. We were worried that MS would not
answer our questions and produce a useless spec. As a test I
wrote an initial importer for Gnumeric on the flight to the
first meeting I attended (about 8 hours incl time in the hotel),
and demoed it (content, formulas, formatting). Wrote
ultra-basic exporter on the flight home (not formatting).
Following this the mistrust on both sides embed somewhat and MS
was willing to improve the documentation in almost all of the
areas we asked about. I added more bells to the Gnumeric
importer as a hobby, and used that to send more information
requests back to the TC for submission to MS. In the end on the
order of 200 or so issues were filed.
+ Lots of additional detail. Some of which applied to the
legacy binary formats too (eg how to measure column widths).
- Very little structural change to facilitate interop. Eg
using booleans vs enums, or string ids vs integer
versioning.
When the TC sent the spec on to the ECMA general assembly back
in Sept 2006, work froze for several months leaving a few
unanswered issues. In that time Novell began MOOX filters for
OO.o and began to generate new questions. I continued my work
in Gnumeric itermitently and produced a few more issues. We had
been assured when things froze the there would be time to
re-open the issue list later. After some heated debate the new
issues were accepted just before I stopped work with Novell.
At my request GNOME joined ECMA last June as a non-profit
member. There are no monetary costs for non-profit members, but
they do not have a formal vote in committee. I was able to
follow up on some of the remaining issues before the ISO fast
track vote ended internal discussion, and the work flow focused
entirely on resolving national issues. I have not taken part in
that process.
Current Gnumeric development of both MOOX and ODF filters is
producing yet more issues for clarification.
Then a fire-hose of indignation appeared and my work on Gnumeric
ceased for a few days, just before the 1.8.0 release.
Which brings us up to date. Hopefully that clarifies the timing and
specifics thus far.
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