NoOp wrote:
On 07/01/2007 03:10 PM, M Henri Day wrote:
Nice work, Jo ! But I can't help thinking that, as others have
suggested, it would be still more effective to write to one's
national bureau of standards and recommend against granting the
OOXMLL file format status as an ISO standard. These offices need to
know that they are being observed by their respective national
publics ; otherwise they can act with complete impunity and therewith
in accordance with the wishes of Microsoft lobbyists, who, I think we
can safely assume, are quite active in this regard. Why not do both -
write the one's national bureau *and* sign the petition (which, when
I last checked, had garnered 14359 signatures) ?...
Henri <http://mhenriday.blogspot.com/>
I would consider the post as spam.
That said, I'm not sure that I fully understand the issue with MS
wishing to register OOXML as an ISO standard; wouldn't that require MS
to fully publish all specifications regarding the protocol/software and
maintain that on a regular basis?
Last I checked (a few months back), their offering contained binary
blobs that were Microsoft specific.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070117145745854
Section 6.2.3.17 "Embedded Object Alternate Image Requests Types (page
5679) and section 6.4.3.1 "Clipboard Format Types" (page 5738) refer to
Windows Metafiles or Enhanced Metafiles – each of which are proprietary
formats that have hard-coded dependencies on the Windows operating
system itself.
OOXML also apparently violates section 2.14 of the ISO/IEC Directives,
Part 1, in that not all of what it takes to implement OOXML appears to
be covered by Microsoft's patent pledge, in two respects. First, the
pledge does not explicitly cover material that is referenced, but not
included in the specification, and second, the Microsoft patent
commitment does not cover optional features. Sections of OOXML that are
not fully described include those that require compliant implementations
to mimic the behavior of Microsoft products, such as those products and
capabilities referred to above (OLE, etc.) Microsoft will need to
clarify whether its patent commitment will in fact extend to these
requirements.
Perhaps the ODF vs the OOXML standard is akin to the Betamax vs VHS of
past. Those formats didn't have an ISO body to contend with in that
fight, and eventually one (VHS) won out over the other.
Not really. It forces bugs existing in MS products to exist in the file
format and other such nonsense. In my mind, however, this is more of a
reason that people might choose to NOT use it.
OOXML does not conform to ISO 8601:2004 "Representation of Dates and
Times." Instead, OOXML section 3.17.4.1, "Date Representation," on page
3305, requires that implementations replicate a Microsoft bug that
dictates that 1900 is a leap year, which in fact it isn't. Similarly, in
order to comply with OOXML, your product would be required to use the
WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function, and therefore assign incorrect dates to
some days of the week, and also miscalculate the number of days between
certain dates.
OOXML does not follow ISO 639 "Codes for the Representation of Names and
Languages."
Personally I don't advocate one over the other; as an application user
I'd simply like to see documented standards so that when I use an
application it can appropriately interpret the application interface and
use it. Perhaps my POV is simplistic and uninformed, but at this point I
really don't understand what the overall issue is regarding MS seeking
ISO standardization/certification. In the past were I to look up an
electrical or network interface, an ASCII/UTF-8/ or character layout,
etc., I could/can simply look up the standard and apply it because it is
accepted, documented, published, and specified down to the bits and
bytes. Wouldn't MS's OOXML be the same if it were accepted by the ISO?
Well stated indeed. We just need to keep the MS specific information out
of the standard if it becomes a standard. I do not mean things that
allow MS documents to be stored and then extracted, just that they do
not have their proprietary formats as part of the OOXML.
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
My Book: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
See Also: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/index.html
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