How-To Geek Forums » Microsoft Office
ISO froze OOXML
(11 posts)
Those people bug me... for years, everybody spent their time complaining that Microsoft doesn't use standards, so it's not possible to use their formats... so MS makes an open format in XML that everybody can use... and they try their best to bash it and stop it because they hate MS.
Well to be fair there are a few other reasons people don't like it. Like instead of using the OpenDocument standard they made they own standard, the OOXML standard contains some Office/Windows specific code that can't be done with other programs/platforms easily and some others.
It's just XML, any application can read it if they choose to.
There's no reason why there can't be more than one standard... we've got hundreds of distros of linux and dozens of web browsers, programming languages, and even hardware standards. All of the bashing is simply because of anti-MS people. There's no merit to any of it.
The _reason_ for having standards is so that you know the exact format a document will be in, so you can read it through another application. POP3 and IMAP are both standards, both are used to retrieve email, although with different functionality. The point is that if you write an application that exactly follows the IMAP standards, you can interact with any IMAP server.
As far as I can tell from the various publications, the 4 countries (Brasil, India, South Africa and Venezuela) that stopped the certification process for now are not against the standard per se, but rather against the rush certification procedure. They claim, that there was not enough time to negotiate the details of the 6000 page standards document. And ISO by its statute has to wait now until those countries (and maybe others) have formulated their positions. So there is hope that the standard will see the light of day - one day. It may just take a little longer.
Anybody "big" has to live with that. People always smell rats and do not understand a genuine business rationale for decisions. Only after many years in a big corporation you get a feel for why things are the way they are. And they do not always follow laymens logic. Weeks or months of discussion that go into one itti, bitty trade-off are hard to fathom for an outsider.
From what I've read on pages like http://www.groklaw.net/article.....1720521698 there are many issues with OOXML like Spreadsheet programs need to treat the year 1900 as a leap year which isn't correct and many other things which how to display them aren't even documented.
So there is some merit to what is being said.
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