The Game Of Jing Pong

Almost a week ago now Alex Brown posted the details of his “smoke test” looking at an ODF document produced by OpenOffice 2.4.0, checking conformance with IS26300 with the ODF 1.0 RelaxNG schemas, using Jing.

For most of last week nobody really seemed to care, there were a couple of press stories but nothing like the coverage of his similar test with an IS29500 schema and document produced by Microsoft Office a week earlier.

Then a couple of days ago IBM’s Rob Weir jumped in with an extremely long post that he titled “ODF Validation for Dummies“. I’ll let you read the details for yourself, while I’m interested in the detail I’m more concerned by the tone of the overall post itself – I’ll come to that further down in this text.

For flavour, here is the opening line from Rob’s post;

Alex Brown has a problem. He can’t figure out how to validate ODF documents.

As you might expect, Dr. Brown felt the need to respond to this comment and posted a similarly long post of his own, digging deeper into his objectives, his findings and his intent.

Alex’s post, titled “ODF validation for the cognoscenti” responds to several parts of Rob’s monologue, as I read through it a part headed “Negativity” caught my eye;

Amid the general downer that is Rob’s blog entry, is an assumption that I share such negative thoughts. I find myself described as “someone who would be well served if he could show that all consortia standards are junk, and that only SC34 (and he himself) could make them good”. Hmmmmm – where did that come from?

For the record, I am an enthusiastic supporter of consortia and consortium standards and know from experience that consortia contain great people who are producing some of the best standards work in the planet: XML 1.0, ODF, XSLT, UBL, OOXML (ha!) – the list goes on. Most recently I was very pleased to see a new working draft of the important new W3C XProc specification – something that SC 34 is specifically deferring to rather than attempt something similar itself. I thoroughly disapprove of the kind of oppositional mindset that sees things in a polarised “ISO vs OASIS” or “ISO vs W3C” way. In my view that mode of thinking already did enough damage during the DIS 29500 project.

Rob’s response – a hand crafted piece of XML that will validate as an IS26300 document.

Well, Yahoo! (am I allowed to use that word?)

So here is my concern.

There are literally over a billion users of office suites in the world today. These users are self selecting their favourite office suite, and at the same time choosing whatever document format is right for them.

While the debate around document formats has been an interesting one for those of us embroiled in it we have to remember that these users are the reason why we’re having the conversations, not because we have nothing else to do other than bicker with one another.

It is fascinating to watch the back and forth ping pong on blogs as points are scored, but the mentality of directly attacking an individual with the goal of proving that you’re right (regardless of the facts) really does not help anybody.

At this point it feels like we are still a long way from a scenario where somebody from the OASIS TC might reach out to Alex or another member of JTC1/SC34 to discuss the challenges that arose during Alex’s simple test, instead the goal seems to be to prove something in the blogosphere. (I’m not sure what)

Common goals around interoperability, long term sustainability of documents and simplicity for users are often articulated by all parties – but if we’re going to achieve any of those goals then the blog based fun has to end, and professional dialogue has to begin.