Strange Symphonies The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Objection to OpenXML Fast Track through ISO

In the continuing battle against OpenXML, letters were written into to SIRIM to oppose the adoption of standard intended to take away the rights of the users into the hands of the corporation.

Best summarized in a quote I found:

[this could be seen as manipulation by] large companies, and it sets the precedent for corruption of the standards process in order to protect market share to the detriment of competition, interoperability and the end user.

Here is my letter to SIRIM:

Dear Members of Sirim,

On behalf of the MNCC OpenDocument Format Special Interest Group, I request SIRIM to raise an objection to the JTC-1-Track Processing of the ECMA 376 Specification v0.1, otherwise known as the Office OpenXML (OOXML) standard.

As you may know the adoption of OOXML is primarily being spearheaded by single corporation, Microsoft.

There are several problems with the OOXML standard:

• Length of the specification
• Contradicting ISO Standards and other existing standards
• Adoption of proprietary extensions
• Existing duplicate ISO Standard - ISO 26300 OpenDocument Format
• Designed for Microsoft Office 2007
• Undocumented tags
• Compatibility with legacy vendor specific file formats
• Violation of ISO/IEC Directives 2.14

Length of the specification:

The length of the OOXML standard is over 6000 pages long. A document of this size does not belong in a Fast Track process. There is not enough time to peruse and investigate the specification for any contradicting and factual errors.

A contributing cause for the size of the specification is that it does not leverage other existing ISO standards, and other standards such as SVG or MathML.

This is demonstrated with OOXML contradicting several ISO standards:

• ISO 216 "Paper sizes:
• ISO 8601 "2004 "Representation of Dates and Times"
• ISO 639 "Codes for the Representations of Names and Languages"
• ISO/EIC 8632 "Computer Graphics Metafiles"
• ISO 26300 "OpenDocument Format"

OOXML utilizes proprietary extensions which would weaken its potential
as a possible standard:

• 6.2.3.17 "Embedded Object Alternate Image Requests Types" (page 5679)
• 6.5.31 "Clipboard Format Types" ( page 5738 )

These sections refer to specific implementations to Windows Metafiles or Enhanced Metafiles, which are proprietary formats hard-coded into the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Existing duplicate ISO Standard - ISO 26300 OpenDocument Format:
On 30th November 2006, ISO recently published the ISO 26300 standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for office documents. With an already existing standard present, it would be inappropriate for a duplicate standard to exist.

Unlike OOXML, ODF implements existing ISO standards, 'rather than recreating the wheel', largely reducing the specifications to 700 pages. Thus making it easier for other people, who have implemented those ISO standards, to adopt ODF.

For a further list of unflattering contradictions please visit:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070123071154671

With regulations in place, such as the lifespan of land grants, documents are required to be kept for longer periods of time, extending over many many years. A document that decides to utilize the OOXML standard would carry in the future a dependency on this grossly huge specification, and future attempts at implementing of OOXML would be hindered.

As can be seen in OOXML's decision to contradict ISO standards this has the potential to create confusion with people implementing theses standards. OOXML does not complement ISO Standards, it contradicts them. Similarly ISO, and SIRIM should not support a specification which contradicts their own standards as this has the potential to tarnish their credibility.

It has been quoted that this could be seen as:

[manipulation by] large companies, and it sets the precedent for corruption of the standards process in order to protect market share to the detriment of competition, interoperability and the end user.

Another contributing factor to the length of the specification, was that it was modeled to comply with the only current implementation, Microsoft Office 2007. As can be seen OOXML was not designed for the users, instead for Microsoft Office 2007. By making it complex, confusing, and huge, Microsoft aims to make it difficult for other people to implement such a standard, thus relenting in opening the office document market, and keeping their monopoly.

Undocumented tags:

Though the specification is 6000 pages long, there still exists a large number of undocumented tags. Ironically non inclusion of these tags, helps to reduce the size of the specification, but the people attempting to in implement the OOXML standard would not be aware of its existence.

The included tags have a tendency to very vendor specific, largely for compatibility with older Microsoft Office file formats.

Violation of ISO/IEC Directives 2.14:

With the use of proprietary extensions, Microsoft is under no agreement to license these, and would be in direct violation of ISO/IEC Directives 2.14.

With a greater demand for an open standard to employ, governments, organizations, educational institutions, are not looking towards OOXML. They are looking towards the already present ISO 26300 Standard OpenDocument format for their needs, and only just recently has the
Italian Standard Organization has adopted it as a standard.

We believe that there exists sufficient documented contradictions to the proposed OOXML standard to justifty the request that SIRIM raise an ojbection to ISO and ECMA to the 'Fast Tracking' of this highly complex and controversial proposal, rather, requesting that it follow the standard ratification process.

Yours sincerely,
Ezwan Aizat Bin Abdullah Faiz
Secretary,
OpenDocument Format Special Interest Group of MNCC