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| France's AFNOR Has an Idea: Merge ODF and OOXML - Updated |
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Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:21 PM EDT
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If you read French, here is AFNOR's very intriguing suggestion, that OOXML and ODF merge. They say their technical experts say it absolutely can be done. In the short term, AFNOR suggests that all the comments must be addressed, but assuming they are, then it suggests that in the short term MSOOXML be designated a "Technical Specification" for 3 years (here's an explanation of the difference between that and a standard); meanwhile, the convergence work should begin, with the goal of establishing one single standard for documents that everyone can use. Sean Daly has translated the statement into English for us.
Update: Andy Updegrove now predicts that ISO on Tuesday will announce that OOXML approval has "failed to achieve enough yes votes to gain approval at this time".
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Office formats: AFNOR proposes to the ISO an approach guaranteeing,
thanks to the ISO process, convergence in the mid-term between ODF and
OOXML and to stabilize OOXML in the short term.
Following the final deliberations during the meeting of its
Normalization Commission which took place on August 28th and 29th,
AFNOR is not closing the door on the recognition by the ISO of Office
Open XML. It proposes to the ISO to organize the convergence between
ODF and Office Open XML.
By numerous contributions, the different stakeholders demonstrated the
need to have a quality OOXML format recognized by the ISO. In a
context where multiple document formats exist, the French experts who
invested a great deal in this work, showed that convergence is
possible between OOXML and the ODF format -- which today is already a
standard -- towards a single, changeable document format standard.
On the basis of this very widely shared observation, and even if a
unanimous point of view could not be attained at the end of these days
concerning the best short- and mid-term solutions, AFNOR makes the
following proposition to the ISO: -
restructure the ECMA standard in two parts as follows:
- in one section having the essential core functionalities and simple
to deploy (OOXML-Core),
- in another section, all the auxiliary functionalities necessary for
compatibility with the existing office files stored by numerous users,
functionalities which would be regrouped in an ensemble called
(OOXML-Extensions),
- take into account a provided set of technical comments emitted on
the proposed standard, in order to make OOXML into an ISO document of
the very highest technical and writing quality possible,
- confer an ISO/TS ("Technical Specification") status valid for three
years for OOXML,
- put in place a convergence process between ISO/CEI 26300 and the
core of OOXML, and to that end, to plan starting now the simultaneous
updating of ISO/CEI 26300 and ISO/TS OOXML (on condition that the
latter be adopted after the previously mentioned restructuring),
with a view to obtaining at the end of the convergence process, a
single standard which would be the most universal possible, and whose
later evolutions would be decided at the ISO level and no longer at
the level of a grouping or category of participants.
To achieve the above objective and allow the emergence of a
convergence process, AFNOR is required in the immediate to not accept
in its current state the text proposed by ECMA. Technically, this
brings AFNOR to a negative vote on the project as it is now presented.
This negative vote is however accompanied by comments which AFNOR
requests be considered in order for it to reconsider its position.
AFNOR commits itself to make known and promote this position
internationally in light of the next step planned for February when
different countries' comments will be examined.
On August 28th and 29th, the AFNOR FDR (Formats de Documents
Révisables) normalization commission concluded five months of intense
lobbying to AFNOR between all the concerned parties by the emergence
of standard file formats: software suppliers, users, administrations,
local governments.
AFNOR is the French representative of the ISO, the international
standards organization. It is the central operator of the French
standardization system which associates experts, standardization
bureaus, and government administrations. It has received from
government administrations, a mission in the general interest,
formalized by the decree of January 26th, 1984.
For more information concerning standards: www.afnor.org
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:24 PM EDT |
We are Microsoft of Borg. You will be OOXiMiLated. Resistance is futile, or not.
HAR!!! HAR!!! HAR!!!
Ahem, sorry. :-)[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Aladdin Sane on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:30 PM EDT |
| Please place article corrections here.
Thanks.
---
Free minds,
Free software [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Aladdin Sane on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:33 PM EDT |
| Place comments here that do not directly relate to the story posted.
I'll
start: What do you do for that 45 seconds you're waiting between making posts
at Groklaw?
---
Free minds, Free software [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Aladdin Sane on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:35 PM EDT |
| Discuss Groklaw News Picks here.
Thanks.
---
Free minds, Free
software [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:37 PM EDT |
Hmm... smells like that beautiful smart card standard ISO 7816-1 where the
"French Position" got standardized together with the ISO Position.
"I fart in your general direction"
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- French Position? - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:42 PM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:41 PM EDT |
Then for sure there'll never be an implementation of ISO OOXML.
It will be a wonderful specification. But no vendor will ever make a product
which conforms to it.
M$ will do as M$ pleases. Everyone else will stick to ISO26300.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: lukep on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:45 PM EDT |
No wonder this idea popped in the AFNOR guy minds.
AFNOR has been one of the main actor of CEN (european standards) and
worked for more than 20 years on that very idea, with the other european
NBs, especially DIN.
And it worked very well in many areas, despite many pride fights.
However, even if it is possible, i really dont see how that would suit M$.
And I dont like the idea of making ECMA376 a TS, as it leaves too much
wriggle room and FUD possibilities to M$.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: JamesK on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 06:45 PM EDT |
While it may be technically possible, I get the feeling that it may be worse
than something designed by a committee!
---
Just say NO to Microsoft.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 07:11 PM EDT |
As an idea, it is certainly interesting and a fresh approach. As a smart way of
forcing Microsoft to either comply and play nice or get out of the game, it is
even better. If this was indeed offered, how can MS say no and keep their
credibility in striving for "openness" and
"interoperability"?
"Come work with us towards a common goal instead of against us, it will be
wonderful!"
"Um, no thanks, we don't trust the rest of the world."
(Just a quick reflection, I haven't had the time to give this enough thought
yet.)
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 07:18 PM EDT |
Harmonizing the format was also New Zealand's opinion, see standards.org.nz,
“Voting ‘no’ with comments provides an opportunity for any technical issues to
be resolved. It also facilitates consideration of merging the document with the
existing ISO/IEC Standard. If the comments are resolved we will have an
opportunity to change New Zealand’s vote to ‘yes’ at a ballot resolution meeting
in February 2008,” said Mr Thomas."
ps. I think it's a good idea to be careful with the "merging"
terminology because ODF uses a mixed-content model whereas OOXML doesn't and
Microsoft have consistently presented this as an argument for why they can't be
harmonized. Of course this isn't actually an issue at all.. "this is a data
modelling issue unrelated to any feature set and so it doesn't affect
harmonizing the formats as I understand it" see nzoss.org.nz[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 07:29 PM EDT |
They say their technical experts say it absolutely can be
done.
Of course it can be done. Nobody except Microsoft has
ever tried to dispute that. There are simply no technical reasons why this is
not possible, just political reasons. One of these political issues concerns
time to market. MS needs an ISO standard now, so they will probably not
be happy with taking the back seat with a Technical Specification and waiting a
couple of years to have a real ISO standard supported by their software. (They
would actually like to have it the other way around: having their software
supported by an ISO standard.)
I think we will most likely see continued
bullying and bribing tactics to pass the vote in February with even more dirty
tricks. For example, there are still many countries which can be "encouraged" to
join as P-members of JTC1 before the ballot resolution meeting in February.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: prayforwind on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 07:48 PM EDT |
Should have been by now unless there's more sculduggery going on no?
---
jabber me: burySCO@jabber.org[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: JamesK on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 07:49 PM EDT |
| This is now beginning to sound like an election.
I hope his prediction is right. ;-) ---
Just say NO to Microsoft.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 08:01 PM EDT |
the French experts who invested a great deal in this work,
showed that convergence is possible between OOXML and the
ODF format -- which today is already a standard -- towards
a single, changeable document format standard.
Obviously there is a complete and total failure to
understand on the part of the French. In that the OOXLM
standard is not complete until Open Office fails to run.
Just like Excel was not complete until Lotus 123 failed to
run.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 08:23 PM EDT |
Trash can OOXML. It is broken, incomplete, proprietary, subject to
MS patents, and unnecessary. We already have a working open
standard.
Why allow MS to ruin a perfectly good standard? Aren't the French
just appeasing MS?
The world's governments and historians would really owe us.[ Reply to This | # ]
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- The Best Idea... - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 02:00 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 08:38 PM EDT |
Or all the other U.S. agencies pressured to accept it?
Ecma should be thoroughly embarrassed -- and discredited.
NIST, too.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Prototrm on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 09:58 PM EDT |
Considering that the OOXML specification is nothing more than the internal C++
data structures used in Microsoft Office, there is no possible way that
Microsoft would agree to making any changes at all, which is why they will never
allow the meeting to go ahead as planned in February. They will first try to
bribe and/or threaten the conditional no votes into yes votes before hand. If
they fail in that, I predict they will withdraw the ISO spec completely, and
destroy the competition the old fashioned way: making sure ODF cannot be made to
work in Office 2007, Vista, or both.
Of course, they will wait until the US government officially announces that
Microsoft is no longer a monopolist and can do whatever they please first.
---
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: darkonc on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 11:23 PM EDT |
| If you peel out the 'auxiliary functionalities necessary for compatibility with
the existing office files stored by numerous users,' you peel out all of those
aspects of OOXML which which Microsoft has been touting as the essential
functionality which makes OOXML worth having.
This seems rather like
decapitating the baby to make it fit in the bathtub. ---
Powerful,
committed communication. Touching the jewel within each person and bringing it
to life.. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: darkonc on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 11:39 PM EDT |
| stephesblog
seems to imply that OOXML writers are an optional part of the
standard.
If this is accurate, does this mean that only OOXML Readers
are protected by Microsoft's patent pledge? Is that why Apple didn't implement
an OOXML exporter -- they're legally barred from doing so? ---
Powerful,
committed communication. Touching the jewel within each person and bringing it
to life.. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: star-dot-h on Monday, September 03 2007 @ 11:40 PM EDT |
| It should be noted that this suggestion was also made by Standards New Zealand
in their commentary so hopefully it will have some legs.
Details here.
---
Free software on every PC on every desk [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: mattflaschen on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 12:14 AM EDT |
| This suggestion could have been implemented starting 5 years ago, when
the OASIS TC initiated development of OpenDocument. Why didn't Microsoft
contribute features for standardization then? Microsoft has claimed, but never
provided evidence, that they had no chance to participate. This seems rather
unlikely, given that they were a member of OASIS at the time, and were
officially invited into the TC. They chose to abstain because they
didn't want a multi-party open standard. Later, as OpenDocument became more
popular, they were forced to create Open XML.
So, it is foolish to have two
standards. And it seems clear who's at fault for that. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: mjr on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 04:35 AM EDT |
SFS, the Finnish standards organisation, has given the results to EFFI whose
response I was involved in preparing.
Oksanen, our representative at the
meeting, has blogged a bit
about it in Finnish, and the actual
ballot is available as a PDF.
So, it seems sanity has prevailed in
this particular battle. Let's see how it goes from here.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Ian Al on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 04:46 AM EDT |
I thought that when one merged the main line and the fast track one got a train
wreck.
Because of the difference in date algorithms we probably won't be able to tell
whether it happened on a Wednesday or a Thursday.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Linux==Genuine Advantage[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 05:34 AM EDT |
It seems to me that the real purpose of this idea is to slow the adoption of
ODF, while sabotaging the ODF standard with unecessary complexity and a new,
long development cycle.
Something like what Microsoft did to OpenGL.
A project to merge ODF and OOXML would simply cause people to wait for the
merged standard before adopting ODF, thus giving Microsoft a chance to catch up
with their Office MS-XML lock-in scheme.
Plus, adding open-ended, and improperly defined extensions to ODF would just
give Microsoft a way to decommoditize and pollute the standard.
There is only one proper way to "combine" the standards, and it does
not involve a project to merge them. If Microsoft wants to be able to store
every possible obscure feature of legacy Office documents into an ODF file, then
let Microsoft identify those features, define them clearly and completely, and
request that they be added to the ODF standard. Then, only add the ones that
make sense, and don't destroy the integrity of ODF with unnecessary complexity.
And don't _ever_ add support for Microsoft's broken date formats! That was only
laziness and incompetence (or a poison pill) on Microsoft's part. Make Microsoft
correct the dates on conversion to ODF.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Bart van Deenen on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 05:43 AM EDT |
| The Finnish standard organization has posted the tally here
(pdf). [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: billyskank on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 06:04 AM EDT |
Although I would laugh my socks off if that is what eventually happened.
Microsoft would not support the resulting standard, of course (except in the
very last resort when they had no choice).
---
It's not the software that's free; it's you.[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Plan B - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 06:37 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 06:54 AM EDT |
A merge would produce a 7000 page standard nobody could hope to follow, meaning
no standard at all effectively but rather probabilistic conversions of various
quality.
That's where we already are.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 04 2007 @ 07:59 AM EDT |
A merged ODF/OOXML standard can only take one form - ODF exists as an ISO
standard and it works, so to avoid duplication ODF should be the basis and OOXML
should add the only new thing it brings in, which is legacy Microsoft document
backward compatibility.
ODF will handle new content. All proprietary Microsoft behaviours and formats
to be incorporated into the combined standard must be fully and publically
documented, provided with a suitable patent covenant and can then be
incorporated into the combined ODF standard. Anything that doesn't conform to
these requirements should be excluded from the standard.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Wesley_Parish on Wednesday, September 05 2007 @ 08:41 AM EDT |
They're not the same sort of file specification, though.
ODF is a
structured file format; ECMA 376 is an
unstructured file format that works on a
different basis:
So
the question isn't whether or not it's a conventional
XML structure. Both ODF and Open XML are XML structures;
one is flat and the
other has a deeper hierarchy (or at
least attempts to do
that).
[...]
The vital thing to understand is formatting itself should
not be viewed as structure. The "view" of the data is not
PART of the data.
The "view" is separate. The fact that you
have Heading 2 after heading 1 does
not imply a structural
relationship between the 2 headings – merely that
they LOOK
different. In a world that espouses the separation of data
and view,
this is a great model. There is no attempt to try
to invent some hierarchical
representation based on the
view of the data.
There are places where Word
actually attempts at runtime to
give the user an impression of hierarchy based
simply on
the formatting, but this is artificial. As I said, Word
never
actually creates this hierarchy. WordprocessingML is
always a streaming
format. The "outline" view is an
artificial inference of the structure that
can be provided
by the application.
You begin to see the
difficulties of combining the two?
ODF is a structured file format, and by
that I mean it the
tags do imply structure; ECMA 376 is a flat streaming file
format, which means that structure is arbitrary.
It might also be
the explanation why there are so
many text formatting
markups:
Taking
an example of
such legacy clarifies what it takes to
implement even a portion of the
documentation. The example
is text formatting. Any of the 3 applications, Word,
Excel
and Powerpoint uses its own text formatting markup. Worse,
the shared
libraries themselves (VML, DrawingML,
MathML, ...) also use separate text
formattings, each
different. Even worse, if that's possible, Word has many
own
ways to do text formatting. Excel has many own ways to
do text formatting.
Powerpoint has many own ways to do text
formatting.
A
streaming file format imposes no overall structure on
the overall office suite;
each segment of the office suite
development team is welcome to balkanize and
fork common
structures, because said office suite has been somewhat
arbitrarily welded together from formerly independent and
competing teams; and
no one is politically strong enough in
Microsoft to bang heads together and
say, "We're doing it
this way, because otherwise we're not doing it at
all."
It's going to take a lot longer that three years to get
a
suitable candidate for merging with ODF out of ECMA 376,
because Microsoft is
going to need to make some serious
internal political changes first - and I'm
not talking
about Senior Executives here. ---
finagement: The
Vampire's veins and Pacific torturers stretching back through his own season.
Well, cutting like a child on one of these states of view, I duck [ Reply to This | # ]
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