OOXML: Standards for accepting standards

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The one requirement is homogenous access to networks, protocols and data formats. Nicos Tsilas, who is described as senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft, was reported to have said that "They have made this a religious and highly political debate. They are doing this because it is advancing their business model. Over 50 percent of IBM's revenues come from consulting services." Free software advocates, on the other hand, would argue that interoperability and IP policy are mutually exclusive concepts, and that part of the problem with this process has been the confusion of proprietary interests with the interests of the network.

One result is that there have been many calls for reform of the standards process. One example is Geir Isene's "Open Letter to ISO" in which he complains that "there is no standard for accepting a standard" and that "it seems ISO is not prepared for a politicised process where a big and influential commercial enterprise will use any means possible to push its own standard through to certification. Committees are flooded by the vendor in support of the standard. Votes are bought and results are hijacked."

Isene suggests that "ISO would greatly benefit from adopting the IETF requirment of two independent reference implementations for passing a standard. This should increase the quality of ISO's IT standards." He also observes that "the strength, integrity and scalability of ISO have been tested. The organisations agility and adaptability will now be measured. May ISO move quickly to fix its own PR and more importantly its own standardisation process."

Exclusively yours

Unfortunately, the problems for OOXML are not restricted to the standards process. The feeling among many users, developers (and by implication many ISO delegates) is that, by accident or design, OOXML suffers from a large number of technical failings. The documentation contains binary specifications, specifications that contradict existing standards, and elements that are covered by "undisclosed patents and incomplete licensing terms". The basic requirement of a standard that it is concise and precise, and can be implemented by any other interested party.

The most serious allegations against OOXML are that it is incomplete in its detail, contains internal and historic contradictions, and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement on other platforms, which is the raison d'être for any standard. The design, implementation, limitations and further development of OOXML are exclusive to Microsoft. Evidence has also been shown that there are demonstrable interoperability failures between Microsoft Office 2007 outputs, which derives from the only existing implementation of the ECMA 376 specification of OOXML, and the specification itself, which is damning evidence against the acceptance of the standard in the first place. These include undocumented non-XML data and XML tags in the Office 2007 outputs that do not appear in the ECMA 376 spcification.

The conventional view is that open standards are the only tenable way forward for the technology industries, where networking necessitates interoperability between a plethora of applications and technologies, unencumbered by patents or other proprietary interests, and it is difficult to see a justification for OOXML when there is a proven open standard that is widely adopted and fulfils these objectives.

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