OOXML: Standards for accepting standards

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The purpose of the meeting, which convened at the International Conference Centre in Geneva last week, was to resolve the unprecedented 3500 comments that had been raised against the original draft specification presented by ECMA to Members of to the Joint Technical Committee of the ISO/IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) last September.

In response ECMA presented 1,100 recommendations for changes to the draft. The BRM only found time to discuss and modify 20 per cent of these recommendations. The remaining 900 recommendations were not discussed, and were waved through apparently on trust and without modification, which signals a considerable failure within the standards process.

No solution

Unsurprisingly, the voting was far from conclusive. As Yoon Kit, representing the Malaysian delegation, observed: "Due to the quirks in the voting mechanisms, a reported 98.4 per cent of ECMA resolutions were approved. This on the surface projects an impression that the BRM is a resounding success. Unfortunately this is not the sentiment of the majority of participants."

"It should have been obvious to the administrators that submitting a 6000+ page document which failed the contradiction period, the 5 month ballot vote and poor resolution dispositions, should be pulled from the process. It should have been blatantly obvious that if you force National Bodies to contribute in the BRM and end up not deliberating on over 80 per cent of their concerns, you will make a lot of people very unhappy..."

"Judging from the reactions from the National Bodies who truly tried to contribute in a positive manner, without having their concerns heard let alone resolved, they leave the BRM with only one decision in their mind come March 29th..."

"The fast tracking process is not suitable for ISO/IEC DIS 29500. It will fail yet again. And this time it will be final."

A toxic leech

OOXML is controversial for a number of reasons. Critics argue that OOXML is not so much a specification as a description of Microsoft's existing proprietary data formats, complete with the replication of historic bugs, the most notorious being the treatment of 1900 as a leap year. The specification was derived internally to describe Microsoft's current data formats, and has not benefitted from the usual wide-ranging debate and participation from competing interests, hammering out their differences to find the points they have in common, that accompany the conventional definition of a standard.

A standard is intended to facilitate multiple implementations of a protocol or data format, not to give validation to the one existing implementation of that format. There have also been complaints that, despite the fact that over 3500 comments were raised against the original specification, delegates weren't able to suggest amendments that contradicted Microsoft's current implementation.

The specification was presented to ECMA as a fait acommplis, and was fast tracked through the auspices of ECMA for acceptance by the ISO, despite, or because of, the prior existence of a competing standard, the Open Document Format (ODF), that has been widely implemented across the industry. In the view of some delegates who have spoken out about the process, fast tracking of the acceptance procedures has meant that the considerable problems identified with the original specification have not received the attention they deserve.

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