OOXML @ ISO: "When is a standard not a standard?"

Free Software Magazine has an excellent point-by-point response (Edward Macnaghten's blog) to the ECMA's response to the contradictions (ISO standards term roughly for 'objections') of JTC1 members (twenty: a record) to the submisssion of OOXML (I'm out of breath!). For anyone wondering whether the objections were real and substantial (and whether the 6000 page standard was a disaster or not), this is an excellent examination of the points of contention with a good understanding of past (good) standards and the impact of standards on the real world.

A couple of the objections point-out tags such as:
  • footnoteLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement)
  • useWord2002TableStyleRules (Emulate Word 2002 Table Style Rules)

Macnaghten also highlights some of the spin that is being spun by the submitter OOXML, Microsoft: the claim that the resistance to OOXML is actually a "proxy for product competition in the marketplace" and that the objections are merely political. By claiming the process has been politicized by its market competitors, MS seeks to claim the high ground.

Macnaghten concludes:
"I do not believe Microsoft are really interested in open standards, but just paying lip service to them. The history of the OOXML and ODF "discussions" supports this theory. OOXML is not as open as it's name applies: it ignores existing standards and it only fully caters for Microsoft Office programs making it near impossible for a competing product to use. By Microsoft's own admission it is simply an "XMLization" of existing closed .doc, .xls and .ppt formats. It should not be adopted by ISO, and certainly not "fast tracked".

ODF is genuinely open. There is no reason why Microsoft cannot use it. Adoption of ODF will benefit everyone who is not trying to maintain a near monopoly in the Office Production Suite domain."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Java, MySql increased performance with Huge Pages

[Resources updates: 2010.07.07 , 2009.11.03 , 2009.05.27 ] Long running, large memory, high performant applications often have special needs with respect to their memory management. On Linux, Solaris and other modern OSes, the translation look-aside buffer ( TLB ) - whose page size of 4k for many CPUs/OSes - becomes a scalability issue in these extreme conditions. In order to get around TLB scalability issues, huge page sizes are used to reduce the impact on performance. This can be of use to installations with large scale Java, MySql and other large memory applications. 300% improvement : " Well, in my case, I was able to achieve an over 3x improvement in my EJB 3 application, of which fully 60 to 70% of that was due to using large page memory with a 3.5GB heap. Now, a 3.5GB heap without the large memory pages didn't provide any benefit over smaller heaps without large pages. Besides the throughput improvements, I also noticed that GC frequency was cut down by two-third
Read more

Canadian Science Policy Conference

The Canadian Science Policy Conference is to held in Toronto, October 28-30, 2009. While the five themes , sub-panels and speakers looking both interesting and relevant, I am disappointed and perhaps a little alarmed that there appears to be no (explicit) mention of research data issues, research data management or research data archiving, despite the series of Canadian consultations examining these issues ( National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data (NCASRD) , 2004; National Data Archive Consultation Building Infrastructure for Access to and Preservation of Research Data , 2002; Data Access in Canada: Issues for Global Change Research” (Royal Society of Canada), 1996 ) and indicating the pressing need for 1) A research data archiving strategy and policy; 2) A research data archive. I think this is an issue that has too long been neglected (although there are some positive signs, like International Polar Year ), impacting Canadian science and innovation, especiall
Read more

Project Torngat: Building Large-Scale Semantic 'Maps of Science' with LuSql, Lucene, Semantic Vectors, R and Processing from Full-Text

Image
Project Torngat is a research project here at NRC - CISTI   [ Note that I am no longer at CISTI and that I am now continuing this work at Carleton University - GN 2010 04 07 ] that looks to use the full-text of journal articles to construct semantic journal maps for use in -- among other things -- projecting article search results onto the map to visualize the results and support interactive exploration and discovery of related articles, term and journals. Starting with 5.7 million full-text articles from 2200+ journals (mostly science, technology and medical (STM)), and using LuSql , Lucene , Semantic Vectors , R , and processing , a two dimensional mapping of a 512 dimension semantic space was created which revealed an excellent correspondence with the 23 human-created journal categories: Semantic Journal Space of 2231 Journals Scaled to Two Dimensions This initial work was initiated to find a technique that would scale, and follow-up work is looking at integrating t
Read more