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The following standards are made freely available for standardization purposes. They are protected by copyright and therefore and unless otherwise specified, no part of these publications may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, scanning, reproduction in whole or in part to another Internet site, without permission in writing from ISO. Requests should be addressed to the ISO Central Secretariat.

ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008

Electronic inserts




Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference




ISO/IEC 29500-2:2008

Electronic inserts



Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 2: Open Packaging Conventions




ISO/IEC 29500-3:2008



Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 3: Markup Compatibility and Extensibility




ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008

Electronic inserts



Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 4: Transitional Migration Features

ISO/IEC 26300:2006

XHTML version

1^st
Information technology -- Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0

XHTML version

I wanted to post a quick reaction to the latest Microsoft bullshit announcement, in which they reportedly plan to "add native support for ODF 1.1". The way they put is very succinct, intentionally probably, and it opens the door for wild guesses.

First of all, Microsoft is a huge Office licensing monopoly. It's so big it even surpasses Windows in sales. Any decline in Office licensing would be dramatic for Microsoft's future. With that alone, you know that any announcement from Microsoft that they are willing to interoperate with other people's software, namely applications, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Here is how, with the release of Office 2007, Microsoft intends to keep their monopoly in Office licensing :

Likewise, since Office 2007 is not a native XML application (the internal representation is a bunch of binary structure, not XML DOM)

Microsoft has won. They wanted the ISO timestamp. They got it. They needed it since governments (and the EU) want such thing for documents now.

Greve told the BBC that genuine adoption of ODF would give consumers more choice. "People will no longer need to use Microsoft Office in order to interoperate. People could switch to GNU/Linux and choose OpenOffice or other applications that support ODF, like Lotus Symphony or Google Docs."

The OpenDocument Format OASIS standard that enables users of varying office suites to exchange documents freely with one another has just been approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard.

The OpenDocument Format (ISO 26300) has been officially published by ISO . More information is available here. This should put to rest any objections that ISO 26300 is not available in its official form for the reference of technologists.

In a surprise move, the company also announced that it intends to participate in the OASIS ODF working group and the corresponding ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 34 working groups for ODF, as well as the ISO Technical Committee 171 working group for PDF, said Doug Mahugh, senior product manager for Microsoft Office.

He added that Microsoft would also introduce an API to allow developers to plug their own converters for formats, such as ODF, into Office to make it the default conversion path. ODF 1.1 was chosen over the ISO-standard ODF 1.0 as a practical decision based upon interoperability with existing implementations, Mahugh explained.

“Customers that are expecting true document fidelity from XML-based, ISO-standard document formats will continue to be disappointed,” said Michael Silver, a Gartner Research vice president. Silver observed that the most compatible formats to use today are Microsoft’s legacy binaries, and he believes that Microsoft will be unlikely to convince customers to move to OOXML in the foreseeable future.

I call on Ecma to withdraw OOXML from ISO and keep control of it themselves. We need it for legacy documents.

Both ODF and OOXML are only one WTO Dispute Resolution Process complaint
away from losing their international standard, national technical
regulation, and government procurement specification status. They do not
meet the minimum requirements of international law. Both are unnecessary
obstacles to international trade; neither specify a uniform and
substitutable product. That does not sound like a sound business plan to me.

So I return to my question posed in an earlier post: Will ODF v. 1.2 under
your leadership attempt to "clearly and unambiguously specify that
conformance requirements essential to achieve the interoperability" and will
the standards-based interoperability between *different* IT systems be
"demonstrable," as required by JTC 1 Directives?

That is not a complicated question and it requires no deep dive into
international law to answer. International law requires what the quoted JTC
1 Directives require in this regard, but for purposes of the point under
discussion we need go no further than the Directives' plain language.


One either adheres to the rules or one forfeits the moral high ground to
complain when others ignore the rules. Where does Rob Weir stand on
complying with the rules?

The issue we were discussing -- and what I believe the ODEF conference was
very much concerned with -- was whether ODF plus vendor-specific extensions
will be classified as conformant ODF. The market requirement is for
"Exchange Formats" and document-level interoperability.

I could repose my question as whether ODF v. 1.2 will "clearly and
unambiguously specify interoperability requirements essential to achieve the
interoperability," as required by JTC 1 Directives. As you noted in an
earlier post in this thread, you can't do interoperability if you use vendor
extensions.


> I see a standard as providing a shared vocabulary for buyers and sellers
> to express their requirements.


You are in error. This is a matter controlled by law rather than by personal
opinion. Standards are all about the substitutability of goods, weights, and
measures. A standard specifies all characteristics of a product, weight, or
measure in mandatory terms so there is uniformity. Standards are the
antithesis of product differentiation. Their very purpose is to eliminate
product differentiation.

I view the spec as confusing, obtuse, error-ridden, x86-centric, incomplete, and redundant.  Microsoft sat on the board of ODF for _years_ without offering any help on the minor items ODF didn't provide that they wanted.  Now that governments start pressing for permanent standards on document storage, MS throws out this half-baked item and expects a reward for good behavior.  Maybe somebody on the board of directors at our company likes it, but the technical folks having to add more work are less than happy about this beast.

If they had to go with XML, couldn't they at least have allowed standard XML with attributes and the like instead of x86 specific, binary incompatible, past-version deprecating, standard-avoiding, crash on normal XML.. ... mess... that they have offered for consumption?  Oh.. but wait, I'm sure the BRM fixed that in the week given.  I'm sure the pretty version will show up any day now.

Where can we expect challenges?

There can be no doubt that OOXML, as a standard, has severe flaws.   It is incomplete, platform specific, application specific, full of contradictions, fails to adhere to existing standards, untestable, and presents a moving target for any IT worker.  There is not an organization in existence, including Microsoft, that promises to actually implement the full standard.  Much of this is due to the fact the final version doesn't actually exist on paper yet, but a large fraction is also do to the patchwork nature of the product.

The reason governments and companies wanted a 'office apps' standard in the first place was to release an avalanche of data from aging applications.  OOXML shows every appearance of being created to prevent this escape, not enable it.   The immaturity of the standard means that it remains a gamble to see if older documents will remain readable or not.  The lack of testing means there is no way to determine what docs actually adhere to it or not.  The ignoring of existing standards guarantees compatibility problems.  All of these factors are handy for the owner of the biggest share of existing documents, as it forces users to continue to use only _their_ application or risk danger from every other quarter.

Of course, all companies try to bend the rules in the their favour, and it would be unfair to pick on Microsoft for doing the same. But what has happened over the last year and a half goes so far beyond the accepted rough and tumble of the standards game that cumulatively it can only be considered as an all-out attack on the machinery of standards-making. Consider the evidence.

The battle over OOXML standarization is all about money and marketshare. Microsoft wants OOXML to qualify as an “open standard” so that the company can continue to sell Office into governments that see ISO as the gold standard bearer. Many of the companies  that have fought publicly against OOXML gaining ISO standardization approval are hoping that failure of OOXML to get the ISO nod will give them a chance to gain more marketshare in a world where Office still runs on more than 90 percent of Windows desktops.

ISO is bound to the business of "interoperability", and has very strict guidelines for interoperability requirements, that are themselves tied to international trade agreements and legal conventions. In this context, it is beyond surprising that ISO allows the "OASIS PAS" and "Ecma Fast Track" channels to remain open, with specification work remaining under the controlling influence of the vendors.

IMHO, the change in Patrick's position is entirely due to the realization that it is impossible to map between OOXML and ODF. I don't know this for sure, but when i read the German Standards Group (DIN) report on harmonization, authorized by the EU-IDABC and provided to ISO, i couldn't help but wonder how Patrick would react. The report definitively ends his OOXML ODF mapping dream.

OOXML on the other hand presents ISO with a very different situation. Because of the way the OOXML - Ecma charter is worded, i don't see how ISO JTC-1 could ever fix the OOXML interoperability problems. ISO approval of OOXML would include acceptance of a charter that defines and limits OOXML interoperability to whatever MSOffice determines it to be. If Patrick and the JTC-1 tried to bring OOXML into compliance with existing ISO Interoperability Requirements, they would have to somehow amend a charter duly approved.

Given that the JTC-1 has yet to address a two year old ISO directive regarding ODF interop compliance, what are the odds they will dare to amend an approved charter? Not good i think.

ISO approval of OOXML is a tragedy for all of us. For sure it's the end of ODF. It's perhaps the end of ISO as a respected standards organization. The issue of open standards itself will become a joke, with the reality of standards by corporation having us all wringing our hands in despair.