Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

[Hagar Delest]

Here is some additional information : The results of the ISO voting: Office Open XML is Disapproved.

See also here : http://www.noooxml.org/start

Let's see what happens next February.

[starcraft.man]

Yay Canada voted no too .

[dmacdonald111]

I certainly hope that MOffice format is not an ISO standard. OMG. This should totally be open source and not even up for debate. Damn Micro$oft. Damn Google (I'm sure they'll be on in it)

Things to do;

gain copyright on the word 'www'
Charge everyone fee everytime they use the word 'www'

[argie]

They failed. Yay. That'll hold them off till Feb atleast.

[mtn]

For the sake of completeness here is the official ISO press release http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070

[st33med]

Now, I doubt that Microsoft will change anything in the document when it comes time to get a consensus. Bugs, mistakes, referrals to kernel functions are vague, proprietary, vendor lock-in....

They won't be changing it so that vendor lock-in is removed. If they do, I won't mind anymore about OOXML being passed...

Except for the other stuff mentioned above.

Which reminds me, what are the comments on the no votes?

[atlfalcons866]

I ask the national members of ISO to vote "NO" in the ballot of ISO DIS 29500 (Office OpenXML or OOXML format) for the following reasons:

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
5. There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;
6. This format conflicts with existing ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids any date before the year 1900: such bugs affect the OOXML specification as well as software applications like Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007.
8. This standard proposal was not created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

here is the link http://www.noooxml.org/petition

[some_random_noob]

I've heard about this issue a number of times, but haven't read anything about it. Could you post a few links about this please? Because I feel like an idiot for not staying up-to-date.

[ThinkBuntu]

What should happen is .doc should be opened. It's a very fine format, if only other programs could easily work with it (no 100KB+ OpenOffice .doc files). What people don't understand is that XML is by its very nature a very slow format. Applications that work with mostly XML are very slow when dealing with data, especially web apps. The slowest is usually a web app that runs on Java and stores data with XML.

For small, simple tasks (XHTML, etc.) XML is a great descriptive format. But for large files, I think it's the wrong direction.

[stoodleysnow]

Hear, hear!=D>