This was originally intended to be a comment on Dmitri’s post on the topic, but it quickly outgrew what I felt would be a polite size for such a comment. Oops!
OOXML hasn’t lost quite yet, and it did come dangerously close to passing in its first run through the Holy Gauntlet of the ISO. With any luck, voting parties will be better informed when its next chance comes around.
OOXML is just the same old formats, along with the same old problems, encoded as something vaguely resembling XML. I doubt Microsoft will clean up the spec enough for ISO to accept it; legacy crap has been a hallmark of their formats since the beginning, and if they haven’t managed to fix that problem yet, I can’t see them fixing it now.
However, even if they do rework the spec into something useful, an even bigger problem remains: Microsoft has shown no intention of using OOXML in a standard fashion; that is, the file formats actually used by Microsoft Office products may be based on OOXML, but it is unlikely they will ever be standard.
This means that there will be no improvement over the current situation, in that there is no guarantee that documents written in Microsoft Office products will be usable elsewhere.
In the past, people used Microsoft’s de facto standards, and accepted this, because they didn’t know otherwise. Now, a lot of people understand the problems of closed, proprietary formats, and some progress has been made. If OOXML is standardised, people will believe that the problem has been solved, and not as many will care about seeking alternatives.
The standardisation of OOXML would cause a serious regression. People will still be using closed, proprietary formats in Microsoft Office products, but now it will be under the guise of openness. A brilliant, disgusting deception.
1 comment:
I'm not even going to say it's brilliant. It's brute-force standardization. They corrupted the secretariat in ISO, to get the fast track approval in the first place, wasting infinite manhours and sanity only to lose the fast track.
Now the same corrupted secretariat has arranged for a resolution meeting to finally vote on OOXML, even though the formal procedure is to chuck it out on its ear after it fails the voting round.
It's depressing how the bodies we rely on, like ISO, are so easily corrupted. What use is a bureaucratic system if every single variable is weighted by money?
I await the destruction of the current US administration and consequent destruction of Microsoft. This shit can only last so long.
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