With ISO's Ballot Resolution Meeting taking place Feb 25th-29th, discussion of the OOXML format and the ISO process is heating up again. Here are four documents that were published today (or at least I found them today):
DIS-29500: Deprecated before use? by Georg Greve
http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-idiosyncrasies.en.html About OOXML's original purpose of preserving compatibility with an idiosyncratic format, how the changes to the format now exclude that compatibility, and how complexity and lack of a re-useable source code reference implementation makes implementation impractical or impossible.
A Pre-BRM Miscellany, by Rob Weir
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/02/pre-brm-miscellany.html "Photo ID requirements, badged access to the meeting room, prohibitions against cameras and recording devices, no observers, no press." (thanks to Sean Daly for this link)
Developers warned over OOXML patent risk, by Brett Winterford
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62037862,00.htm ZDNet Australia article about concern over the means of terms in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise
A picture of a printed copy of the OOXML spec :-)
http://blog.janik.cz/images/OOXMLSpec.png (I hope there was a good reason for making this printed copy. It will surely never be read. At least publicising this picture makes it less likely that someone else will think it necessary to also do a printing.)
FWIW, I put these four links in a blog entry too: http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/ooxml_already...
There should be a blog-worthy announcement later this week about open standards, so if anyone else has other links they think are particularly new and interesting, please let me know (on or off list).
On 18/02/2008, Ciaran O'Riordan ciaran@fsfe.org wrote:
DIS-29500: Deprecated before use? by Georg Greve http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-idiosyncrasies.en.html About OOXML's original purpose of preserving compatibility with an idiosyncratic format, how the changes to the format now exclude that compatibility, and how complexity and lack of a re-useable source code reference implementation makes implementation impractical or impossible.
The reference to ECMA-234 is most apposite. I was surprised to find no Wikipedia article on ECMA-234. Does anyone think they have sufficient third-party references to hand to write one up? Particularly contemporary coverage of the bit where Microsoft promptly ignored ECMA-234 in Windows 95. If you don't want to do the writing, please send 'em my way.
(My previous personal favourite article about Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Display How to write real-life comedy in encyclopedic format.)
- d.