So ISO rubberstamped Microsoft's OOXML, a lame excuse for an 'open' format.

The promise of ODF was that we could free the information inside office documents, making it available to new innovative programs and web services. Sadly, the real aim of OOXML was to maintain Microsoft's Office Monopoly. This created a massive conflict of interest in a large number of the committees. I wonder if society will look back at this as the moment that general progress of the information revolution was put back a generation?

Dirty tricks at ISO

One of the main problems was that ISO itself is not standardised. Having every country do its own thing has made it much easier for a single large vendor with a lot of money to subvert the process. The voice of technical reason lost out to Microsoft's cold hard dollars, and in the process ISO has lost a lot of credibility.

The national standards bodies are supposed to represent the interest of their populations, instead we had Microsoft's own employees, or employees of Microsoft's Business Partners, voting for Microsoft's standard. This is a massive conflict of interest, and it is the general public that have been shafted.

The OOXML website has made a list:

> Presence of Microsoft Business Partners has been reported in the following countries: Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, Italy, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America. Furthermore, it has been reported in several countries, such as France and Malaysia, that Microsoft has lobbied the government and the responsible ministers to override the decisions of the technical committees, which spoke out against an approval of the format.

I was particularly unimpressed with BSI, the UK standards body. Did nobody tell them that Easter is over already, that we no longer need a Judas? There was over a month between the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva and the vote deadline. However, the BSI publicly opposed OOXML, and in the last day or two secretly changed their vote, avoiding the British public whom they are supposed to represent. BTW, the head of the British commitee was ... you guessed it ... a Microsoft Business Partner.

Microsoft's own planet

By approving OOXML, ISO has made one hell of a mess. Not least because the so-called "standardisation process" did not involve much standardisation. OOXML is still rather un-standard in that it conflicts with a number of other standards. Here are some of the easy to understand problems:

We already have an open standard for mathematical formulae and notation, it is called MathML and is published by the W3C math working group.

• OOXML ignores this and uses its own Microsoft-specific Maths language.

We already have an open standard for vector graphics called Scalable Vector Graphics. This was produced to replace vendor specific formats such as Adobe's PGML and Microsoft's VML.

• OOXML ignores this and uses Microsoft-specific VML.

We have a specification (RFC 3987) for UTF-8 capable Internet addresses. This allows URLs to be written in any language.

• OOXML ignores this and can only use Latin characters in URLs, so speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other languages are plain out of luck.

Other standards, including OpenDocument, support any type of weekend. This is because in Israel and dozens of Muslim countries, the weekend is not Saturday and Sunday.

• OOXML ignores this and forces you to use the Christian week. If you are a Muslim or a Jew, well tough luck.

The Gregorian calendar has been an open standard since 1582. For example, the whole world agrees that according to the Gregorian calender, the first of January 1900 was a Monday.

• OOXML ignores this and uses Microsoft's own strange view of time. For example, according to OOXML which includes the bugs from Excel, the first of January 1900 is a Sunday, despite it being a Monday in the Gregorian calender. Indeed, no historical date can be relied on. Talking of 1900, according to the Gregorian calender, 1900 was not a leap year, but guess what, according to OOXML, it is!

We could go on and on. There are also lots of important features, macros for example, that are referred to in passing but are not defined in the specification, how they are supposed to work is still a big secret.

The biggest problem of all is that we also have ODF, a technically far superior standard. ODF is also supposed to be the standard for office documents.

Where do we go from here?

> Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Sir Winston Churchill, November 1942

How does one deal with two incompatible standards? Microsoft always trots out this concept of "competing standards", but this is doublespeak; by definition if there are more than one specification then there is no standard.

Well another option is that one of the standards is ditched. That is not going to happen in the short term, it seems that positions are far too entrenched for that.

The only option left is a process of harmonisation between OOXML and all the standards mentioned above, including ODF. This was already suggested by France and others, but ISO ignored this. Well, even if ISO will not be the venue for this, the harmonisation will happen anyway, outside ISO.

You can stand under my umbrella

To start with we are going to need a 'meta-standard', an agreed mapping between ODF elements and OOXML elements. Microsoft probably won't participate in this, but that does not matter if all the producers of ODF-compliant software are on board.

The key is that when someone opens an OOXML document and saves it as ODF, that the same ODF document is produced (and vice-versa). This way, the free world can carry on with ODF regardless, and let OOXML fail on its own lack of merit.

Is OOXML an ISO standard or a Microsoft standard?

An interesting question is who controls the evolution of the 'standard'? The OOOXML specification was originally written by Microsoft staff. It was then rubber-stamped by ECMA and handed on to ISO, who made a few tiny changes and stampted it again.

However, the standard is now controlled by an ISO committee called JTC1/SC34 who are tasked with improving and stabilising it.

Microsoft may like to think that every time it produces a new version of its "Microsoft Office" product, it can just fax the changes back to ISO, but that is not how it is supposed to work, it is up to the SC34 committee and anyone should, at least in theory, be able to submit suggested amendments to the standard.

A lot of work was done in the previous stage that the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva did not have time for. National standards bodies and independent experts wrote reports and draft fixes for many of OOXML's technical defects; which mostly were ignored. These should be brought back to SC34 as amendments.

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