Hello everyone.
Yes, the meeting took place yesterday. Apparently FFII had their date wrong.
I received an invitation from Michael Cassar of MSA, since I had already
participated in a number of technical committees with MSA related to language
and localization. I didn't realise others could attend.
The meeting was the first one for the newly-being-set-up technical committee
(TC) which will mirror the JTC1, an ISO committee for all things IT related. It
was set up rather hurriedly, with some pressure from Microsoft, to vote on the
OOXML standard however that will only be its first task - it's an ongoing
committee which will have other meetings to decide on other matters.
The meeting was attended by Michael Cassar, Frank Balzan and George Cutajar
from MSA itself, Pierre Mallia (Microsoft Malta), Antonio Ghio (laywer, Fenech
& Fenech), John Abela from University, Pierre Vella from MITTS, Sandro Grech
from Exigy (a Microsoft Gold Partner), and yours truly.
At the start of the meeting, Michael Cassar (MSA) explained something about the
composition of such TCs - namely that companies are not represented on TCs, but
only NGOs and other bodies, like the FOI and Chamber of Commerce. Each of these
can send more than one representative but they will have one vote each. Thus,
Microsoft Malta or Exigy cannot be represented as such, but the FOI can select
an individual from Microsoft Malta as its nominee. The MLUG is an NGO. MITTS
seems to be kinda "not exactly a company". For the rest, they will need to
produce something - even an email - from the respective body such as FOI,
confirming them as their nominee. Once on the TC however, all individuals are
supposed to be working for the common good, not representing their own
companies or groups. All this seems to have taken Pierre Mallia by surprise,
and they have some reservations about whether they will manage to get the
requisite approval from University, FOI, Chamber etc.
Afterwards, Pierre Mallia introduced the only topic on the agenda - the OOXML
proposed standard. After giving a brief introduction about the proposed
standard, I moved a 3-point objection. The text of a document I distributed is
found below:
----start
Arguments about DIS 29500 (OOXML)
One standard, one test, accepted everywhere?
Item 2.2 in the "fast track procedure" is "to ascertain that there is no
evident contradiction with other International Standards". ISO's own aim is for
"one standard, one test, and one conformity assessment procedure accepted
everywhere". However, ISO already has an existing standard for an XML office
document format. ISO/IEC 26300 describes the document format commonly known as
ODF (Open Document Format). This format is already used by a number of software
packages, including OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Google Documents and others - a
total of over 30 applications.
Even Microsoft Office 2007 has the ability to store its documents in the ODF
format, through a Microsoft-sponsored ODF converter. The site for this project
states as its goal "to provide translators to allow for interoperability
between applications based on ODF (OpenDocument) 1.0 standards and Microsoft
OpenXML based Office applications."
In addition to needlessly defining a new document standard, OOXML defines
several new formats instead of using existing and established standards. For
example:
* SpreadsheetML uses decimal time instead of ISO8601. The decimal time
format contains errors such as treating 1900 as a leap year. In fact the OOXML
specification forbids applications from supporting dates before 1900.
* DrawingML is used instead of SVG (W3C standard) or ISO/IEC 26300:2006.
* a new mathematical format instead of MathML (W3C standard)
* book 4 section 2.18.66 uses a new numbering format instead of ISO 10646.
* OOXML uses its own list of language codes instead of ISO639.
* OOXML defines its own hashing algorithms instead of ISO/IEC 10118-3 or
W3C XML-ENC.
In part due to its failure to use existing standards, the full OOXML standard
is over 6,000 pages long (about 10 times the ODF standard). To fast-track this
specification leaves insufficient time for proper evaluation - a mere 30 day
evaluation period. In addition, the JTC directives state that "the
specification shall have had sufficient review over an extended time period to
characterise it as being stable."
The new proposed format "was designed from the start to be capable of
faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents,
presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by
Microsoft Corporation." However a standard must not be tied to any specific
vendor or product. By comparison, the ODF was created by OASIS (Organization
for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a wide consortium
which includes many representatives of the IT industry - including Microsoft -
to be able to represent documents from any vendor or product.
The document is full of proprietary elements and attributes like
autoSpaceLikeWord95, useWord97LineBreakRules, useWord2002TableStyleRules. Some
elements require implementers to implement certain proprietary binary formats,
including Microsoft's own older document formats, which are not open standards,
often undocumented and sold under licenses that specifically prohibit
reverse-engineering or reimplementation.
The OOXML standard leaves many elements undefined. For example in book 4
section 6.1.2.19, in the equationxml attribute of the shape element the "actual
format of the contents of this attribute are application-defined". Similarly,
it refers to styles like apples, scaredCat, heebieJeebies, which are
incompletely defined (e.g missing height, width, color-depth, orientation).
Line styles babyRattle, balloonsHotair, etc provide no details on horizontal,
vertical and corner scenarios.
Resources and references
Comprehensive list of objections to OOXML:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
Microsoft's ODF plugin for Office: http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter
Applications supporting ODF: http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/applications
----end
During this discussion, the first argument was pretty much discarded. However
there was quite a bit of interest about the other points - namely that the
specification is incomplete, and that it depends on proprietary products. In
view of this, I am preparing a more comprehensive document concentrating on the
flaws in the specification itself. I've found quite a few resources on the web.
The next meeting is slated for Monday 20th August.
Ramon Casha
Software Services
Megabyte Limited (www.megabyte.net)
F4, The Technopark, Mosta MST3000, Malta
tel (+356) 21421600 - fax (+356) 21421590
Megabyte
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gregory Smirnov
Sent: Il-Ħamis, 9 ta' Awissu 2007 09:23
To: Malta Linux User Group - general list
Subject: Re: [LINUX.ORG.MT] Fwd: URGENT: OOXML in Malta: meeting tomorrow
Philip,
Fist, my apologies for delayed post. But I was far from Internet and found it
only today morning. I think more people in Malta received same post, but
nobody forwarded it here.
Huh! As I just learned now, meeting actually happend yesterday...
I think we will hear from them today, and get some light on what has happened.
Gregory.
On Thursday 09 August 2007 08:53:26 Philip Serracino Inglott wrote:
> Why do we get to know about this now? Is there more info? Who will attend
> etc... Can I? Should I attend?
>
> Philip
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