Oliver Bell’s weblog

A huge amount of information has passed through my inbox since the DIS29500 Ballot Resolution Meeting, most of it constructive and some of it just a predictable last ditch attempt to inappropriately discredit a very successful meeting. 

Originating from the Asia Pacific region, I’m seeing emails being sent to certain countries in Asia that attempt to obfuscate details of the meeting as well as official looking documents being mailed to places as far afield as the Caribbean that try to apply a negative spin to the facts of what happened at the BRM and the progress that has been made with DIS29500, both examples disregard much of the process, the preparation and the consensus that was reached during the time in Geneva.

The communications involved are not from their respective national bodies, they come from individuals I have met over the last year who claim that they don’t have the time that is needed to complete their own national review - on some minor level, if their objections are valid, then it is amusing that they have so much time time to get involved in extra curricular work that extends beyond their home geographies.

Oddly the text of both communications is ambiguous enough to try and insinuate that a representative national view is being put forwards, when it is clearly not. One of the communications goes so far as to express the views of several other nations, facts that the individual concerned could not possibly have any insight into.

I’m sure there is a lot more of the same going on behind the scenes, it is entertaining to watch but ostensibly it is also mostly irrelevant.

At best it is just fun and predictable under-the-covers shenanigans, and the recipent national bodies appear to be recognizing these communications for what they are - cheap shots.

On a more positive front, there is an increasing amount of commentary being published that talks about the progress that was made during the meeting in Geneva, outlining what that means for the overall specification and where it takes us from here.

When all is said and done progress is what the ISO directives encourage, not conflict or procrastination.

Brian Jones has a really good wrap up of some of the progress that was made during the meeting itself, he talks about the bigger topics that were discussed during the five days in Genevaand what all this ultimately means for the improvement of the specification against the national requirements that were expressed there, he also talks about how Ecma prepared for the meeting through their ongoing work with the various national bodies around the world;

For the past two months, Ecma officially held 4 calls per week where national bodies could discuss the comments, and Ecma could explain their proposed resolutions. This meant that by the time we got to the BRM, the countries had time to find which Ecma responses they were not quite satisfied with, and raise those issues at the BRM. The purpose of this entire process is to make improvements to the specification, which in turn may lead countries to change their vote on whether or not they approve the overall spec.

Brian goes on to cover the fact that 98% of Ecma’s proposed dispositions were approved by the BRM, details of new proposals that were put forwards during the meeting and progress on issues such as conformance, OpenXML as a multi-part standard, support for dates, improvements to accessibility (go New Zealand!), clean up of some of the SpreadsheetML functions and work with the ever controversial bitmasks.

Secondly, Rick Jelliffe has a post on his blog that talks about modifications that were made to the DIS29500 specification during the BRM in term of small, medium and large changes, and then goes on to examine the future, not only for OpenXML but also for ODF;

The upshot is that, if DIS29500 mark II and ODF 1.2 both get accepted as standards, by the end of 2008 we should have two standards which together can thoroughly cover the field of representing current and legacy office documents, each representing one of the two dominant commercial traditions, with both under active and significantly open maintenance to fill in the remaining gaps and to repair pending broken parts, with clear cross-mapping to allow interconversion, with an increasing level of modularity so that the can share their component parts, and at least with a feasible agenda of co-evolution and other kinds of convergence.

Maintenance for ISO/IEC DIS29500 (Office Open XML) will ultimately be governed by JTC1’s SC34, and that presents a phenomenal amount of opportunity for anybody who chooses to get involved in that process.

Finally, if I have learned one thing during the last year it is that there is a need to consult recognised experts at every step in the process to understand what is really going on.

As I look around the internet it is very hard to separate those who are just guessing at how the process should be working, or who have a vested interest in the outcome, from those who actually understand how it works. I put myself in one of these categories, so I’m always keen to talk to people who can give me a more rounded view of the world.

One such expert is Jan van den Beld, the former Secretary General of Ecma International. I have been travelling with Jan over the last few days and have had the chance to explore several areas of the ISO and FastTrack processes that previously made little sense to me, his insight into the history and the reasons for why things work they way they do is enlightening to say the least.

For those who are not aware, the current FastTrack directives are dedicated to Mr. van den Beld out of respect for his decades of service to ISO and to standardization in general.

Jan maintains a blog, and has from time to time commented on the process that OpenXML has been going through, most recently he has posted some thoughts on the BRM itself.

I have extracted his words on what consensus at the meeting meant and now to interpret the outcome, but I would encourage you to read his whole post. (and anything else he posts in the future!)

Alex Brown, the BRM Convener, indicated that the Edited Notes of the Meeting and the Resolutions of the Meeting are publicly available. The voting results as well. By reading those documents and discussing with many people who were present, it is now clear that:

· Consensus prevailed on the process, as shown in the ISO press release http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1117 (“The BRM was not intended to be a public event but followed the orderly and inclusive process of ISO and IEC”)

· Consensus prevailed on the vote itself: the voting procedures were discussed in length for almost half a day during the BRM on Wednesday and the Resolutions of the Meeting show that the voting procedures were adopted by wide consensus (29 in favor; none against; two abstentions)

· Consensus prevailed during the technical discussions as a look at the Resolutions of the Meeting shows that a very important set of technical work was achieved and adopted by wide consensus during the BRM itself (see list of technical work below)

· Consensus prevailed on adopting 98.7% of the responses (828 + 186 responses (out of 1027)), leaving only 13 responses to be solved during the maintenance phase.

· Consensus is prevailing on the result of the BRM. Many countries are reporting that the BRM provided a positive outcome. For examples the HoD of the US writes in his official report that the “BRM was Successful — Compromises were reached which are acceptable to the U.S.” and the US V1 technical committee votes to recommend Approval of DIS 29500.

Many balanced statements are now published on the BRM for example from Norway, New Zealand, Denmark and the ODF Editor himself http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2008/03/05/some-balanced-statements-regarding-the-open-xml-brm.aspx!

Whatever the outcome of all of this work it is clear that the OpenXML specification has seen significant improvement over the last 18 months, most of it deriving from the inclusion of thousands of individuals from the 87 voting countries that are represented in this process.

So we’re a few days past the end of the BRM, as I suggested in my last post we’re starting to see an increasingly solid picture emerge of the success of the meeting and high levels of positive progress made during the five days in Geneva.

Of course folks who have been working against OpenXML over the last year are still doing all they can to continue to whip up the frenzy that increasingly appears to have been staged for the press during the closing part of last week.

On a much more positive and productive note, over the course of the weekend we have started to see National Standards Bodies issue press releases talking about the meeting and how it served their national interests, along with some more rounded information about the process, what the vote actually was and what was approved.

First of all a press release from Standards Norway, Jason Matusow has an English translation on his blog this morning.

The release talks about the meeting purpose, the value that the Norwegian delegation got from attending and includes some quotes from the delegation members.

Every country had the opportunity to put forward their most important comments at the meeting, and most of the Norwegian comments got a good run-through. This goes for instance to the Norwegian proposal on multi-part and “scope” of the separate parts. The meeting was also conducted in an efficient and proper manner according to the instructions and rules for ISO/IEC BRM-meetings. The standards proposal for ISO/IEC 29500 will now be changed by the Editor according to the instructions given during the BRM-meeting.

Second is a similar press release from the Danish National Body, their release is shorter but also talks about the involvement of the Danish delegation at the BRM and how they achieved their objectives by representing Denmark’s comments on the original DIS and as a result have improved the standard.

Again Jason has an English translation up on his site.

The Danish delegations mission to ensure a Danish fingerprint on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML, and thus improve the standard, was fully accomplished, since all Danish comments have been approved to be worked into ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML. 

Finally, Alex Brown has posted more information in the comments section on Updegrove’s newly renamed post, Alex talks more about the actual process at the meeting, rather than some of the assumptions and suppositions that we have seen posted elsewhere.

I really wanted to post the whole comment here but it was too much text. I would encourage to to jump over to Andy’s blog and read it for yourself, it probably has more value in the context of the entire conversation anyway.

Here is a extract from the comment, as I say please click the link above to read the whole conversation;

Your headline has now transitioned from being “not even wrong” to “wrong”. If you want to fix it you should remove the words “fail to”. However, since this is not then a very on-message headline for you I suggest maybe you should have something like “OOXML still in flux as clock ticks down” or “BRM performs emergency surgery on OOXML in desperate rescue attempt” or some such.

I think it is wrong for you to claim your original headline was some kind of necessary counterbalance to Jason Matusow’s: his was predictably on-message (from the MS POV), yours was (and is) factually misleading.

Also, by my records Charles Schulz was not a BRM delegate as you categorize him.

You then raise several points about the adequacy of the Fast Track process. Fair enough; no comment. On the particular questions about in-meeting voting I can tell you:

• Yes, it was a good idea to take votes (congratulations to the BRM on wisely choosing this route)
• Yes, it was within my, and the meeting’s, powers to allow it
• Yes, what happened was fully in accord with the JTC 1 Directives (O-member voting and all)

OBVIOUSLY (given the red hot controversy here) voting procedure was discussed in minute detail, and decided, in consultation with ITTF before the BRM started. I (as somebody primarily used to SC participation, rather than fast tracking) had some un-learning to do, and I think some other commentators do too. If a country has a complaint it can appeal formally — that (rather than wittering to the press) is the correct way to do it.

Well, the Ballot Resolution Meeting for ISO/IEC DIS29500 (OpenXML) is now over and done with.

Working out what happened in the room itself is a complex task while we still wait for an official release from ISO/IEC, I’m sure we will see something from then over the next few days.

I’ve seen a couple of posts this evening, one from somebody who was part of the process and was in the room and one from somebody who was not.

Brian Jones, who was in the room for the meeting, posted a very positive couple of paragraphs, talking about the significant progress that was made during the meeting. Brian discusses the work that the National Bodies have done over the last few days and the significant improvements to the DIS29500 specification that he believes will come out of that work.

Andy Updegrove, who was not in the room for the meeting, posted a very different story. He discusses outcomes of the various issues that were discussed during the meeting. Given that no information has been released from ISO/IEC I struggle a little with this post and can only guess that Andy is rushing to be “first with the news”.

In his post Andy talks about how 98% of the dispositions were approved, then goes on to talk about how the meeting failed. I’m not sure what success looks like in Andy’s world, but I’m guessing that consensus is only achieved when 100% of people agree with him.

Updegrove’s post is not totally unprecedented. On a couple of occasions last summer he rushed to explain that the National Body in the United States had voted for a disapprove for DIS29500 as the committee went through a preliminary voting process. That was right before the United States approved the draft standard for DIS29500, a fact that I can’t find documented on his blog.

As always, Jason Matusow has a balanced view of the week, the meeting and the outcome.

There was an unprecedented number of delegations from national standards bodies that came to Geneva and participated in the BRM. I have the utmost respect for the contributions from all of the national bodies (P-members and O-members alike). The result of this week’s discussions, by any reasonable measure, has greatly improved the specification and produced a great result. The BRM was a complete success - congratulations to all who were involved with it.

For now I guess we will have to wait for the details of the final outcome, everybody I have spoken to tells me it was a very positive meeting and a resounding success.

March 2nd, additional:  

I see Alex Brown (the Chairman and Convenor of the BRM) has posted a very brief comment on Updegrove’s blog, seeming to confirm that, in the eyes of the lead of the meeting, the conclusions that Andy is reaching don’t reflect the meeting itself;

Authored by: Alex Brown on Saturday, March 01 2008 @ 03:59 AM PST
Andy,

I’m won’t be composing a blog entry on the BRM for a bit, but I wil point out that your article contains surprising inaccuracies about what the subject of the vote was, how it worked, and what the governing rules were. A health warning is in order.

Things are getting more exciting as we get closer to the Ballot Resolution Meeting for DIS29500 (OpenXML) in Geneva.

I thought it might be useful to look at a few of the terms that have become part of the generic standards lexicon during this process and see if I can define them a little for the more curious among you.

This might be really important as Geneva approaches, being able to speak the relevant lingo opens up access to a whole range of events that various third parties appear to be running alongside the BRM, mostly with the goal of influencing the outcome of the meeting to suit whatever agenda the hosting party has.

Regardless, each one of these events represents a free dinner, free glasses of whatever you fancy and some controversial yet predictable chit chat.

All of these terms appear to be important if you are thinking about blogging about OpenXML during the BRM, or if you’re just planning on mingling at some of the side events… I hear that there will  be free boat trips, open bars, and “unbiased” technical experts who just happen to be in Geneva for the whole week to help out.

So, here goes, just a few things that you can drop into conversation to give yourself a little more credibility with this crowd as you enjoy the view of Lake Geneva while sipping on a free glass or wine, beer or fruit juice;

“Troll” - this is a term that is affectionately used to refer to somebody who wants to post a comment on your blog, or write a blog entry of their own, that you do not fully agree with.

Bob Sutor, an IBM Vice President, emphasized the term in a post of his this morning, I’m not sure exactly what his text means (I have not followed Bob’s blog all that closely of late) but I think he is implying that if you don’t agree with him then he would rather not hear from you.

If you do get stuck in conversation with an apparent stranger over a free cocktail then be sure to refer to just about anybody in the community who speaks in favour of OpenXML as a troll.

In Internet parlance trolls are only there to agitate a situation, you have to convince people that to you it is clear that anybody speaking in favour of OpenXML must only be doing so because they enjoy starting arguments with strangers on the interweb, it isn’t possible that they’re just expressing their own valid point of view.

“Corporate Shill” - This is a great way of writing off experts who refuse to tow the line laid down by the ODF Alliance and their members. These guys are easy to spot, they’re probably the ones offering constructive and positive comments during the BRM itself.

It is pretty clear that anybody with expertise on the topic of OpenXML who happens to have good things to say must be on the payroll of one vendor or another. You have to at least pretend that it would be impossible for any unbiased individual to come to any conclusion other than full support for a single standard, that has been developed mostly by your party hosts, without having been corrupted in one way or another.

You can also use this important term to refer to anybody who chooses to commit their own time and resources to turn up in Geneva and add their expertise into the debate who doesn’t just harp on about ODF all the time.

“Corrupt Government Official” - Another useful addition to your phrase book for any evenings spent floating around beautiful Lake Geneva.

This is a term generally used to describe any government employee or official who has arrived at their own conclusions around the current standardization process. Many of these officials decide that support for multiple standards in their market place is good for a healthy ICT environment, some choose to support OpenXML alongside ODF, and others just don’t want to mandate technology standards at all, leaving the market to make its own decisions.

Whichever way, you need to be ready to carry the view that none of these people could possibly have come to any of these conclusions without being corrupt or otherwise being pressured by somebody.

Free thought by senior and experienced government officials in this area is something that you have to pretend just can’t be tolerated, drop your guard for a moment and somebody might take your drink off you.

“Stuffed Committee”- Before you head down to the quay to board your boat you will need to be ready with some smart anecdotes on this topic. A quick search will present you with some pre-reading, usually a third hand blog entry on a site run by somebody who was not actually there and probably wasn’t part of the process that they’re commenting on.

A stuffed committee refers to any national body where Microsoft partners or other organizations who are already working with OpenXML have turned up to join in the technical debate.

You need to think carefully about these groups, and why they came to argue with the likes of IBM and Google. Mostly they represent their own business, their employees and their customers, many of whom already choose to use OpenXML as part of their development cycles and are already building strong expertise deploying solutions built on the existing draft standard. Who would have thought they would have anything useful to add to the conversation? totally outrageous.

“Paid Off Reporter” - There are lots of these around, they are easy to spot, and they are basically any journalist who chooses to write a story that does not align with the views of the ODF Alliance. Usually they are reporters who have spent time researching the issues being debated and are “reporting” on what they have learned along the way.

So, there you have it. These five terms should be enough to give you a grounding in the language that you will need to get through the evenings. My only other word of advice is to ensure that you don’t actually express any opinions of your own during the evening, in particular any opinions supporting OpenXML.

It is easy to move from corporate guest into one of the five categories of folks above… and if that happens you’ll be spending evenings on your own in your hotel, or worse still, engaging in discussions with other more positive BRM participants over dinner somewhere.

It has been a busy week on the OpenXML front, I have been travelling for the last few days and have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to catch up on the long list in my inbox. Three of the items stand out;

1. Accessibility. A group of accessibility experts have worked on reviewing Ecma-376 (DIS29500) and have produced a set of guidelines for developers wanting to use the rich set of accessibility features contained within the spec.

The report itself can be downloaded from the OpenXMLDeveloper site by following this link. The abstract from the start of the document reads;

This document is a guide for applications that support DIS 29500 (ECMA 376 Office Open XML) specification with the goal of encouraging the creation of accessible Office Open XML documents. Office Open XML provides a rich infrastructure for creating content that meets the needs of people with disabilities. This document’s guidance must be followed in order to ensure Office Open XML implementations are consistent with respect to their support for accessibility at both the application and output level. Authors and developers are encouraged to follow these guidelines in order to enable users with disabilities to consume content or to extract the full meaning of Office Open XML documents.

2. The Burton Group look at OpenXML and ODF. Mary Jo Foley covers this for ZDNet. The Burton Group have issued an independently generated 37 page report that looks at the state document formats in the context of OpenXML and ODF, the conclusions reached by the two authors are very favourable towards the work that we have been doing with OpenXML in recent years. The ZDNet coverage opens with;

Market researchers with the Burton Group have issued a 37-page study–not commissioned by Microsoft or any other tech vendor–that finds Microsoft’s OOXML document format to be more useful than the rival ODF format backed by Microsoft’s competitors.

The report is called “What’s up DOC?” and can be downloaded from The Burton Group here. (registration required)

3. DIS29500 Proposed Dispositions Complete. Finally, several blogs are reporting that Ecma International’s TC45 working group have hit their milestone of responding to all 3522 comments with proposed dispositions. The full report from Ecma can be found here, and Microsoft’s representative on TC45, Brian Jones, talks about the milestone here. From Brian’s blog;

It’s been a ton of hard work over the past several months, and it really feels great to move onto the final stage of this process (I need some sleep). It’s unbelievable how much work we’ve been able to accomplish within TC45. Similar to how we moved from a 2,000 page spec to a 6,000 in 2006, in 2007 we were able to respond to 3,500 comments and generated a 2,300 page document (a bit less that a page per comment) where I believe we were able to successfully handle the national bodies comments.

Doug Mahugh is a member of the INCITS V1 Committee in the US, in his review of the the proposed dispositions he characterizes them in the following way;

• Addition of useful information for developers, such as the thorough documentation of compat settings. Want to know what it means to “autospace like Word 95″ or “truncate font heights like WP6″? That’s all spelled out now, so that any developer can implement these behaviors.
• New flexibility in the formats, such as extensible page borders, support for new types of content, and new options for date handling. Want to use ISO 8601 dates in an Open XML spreadsheet? Now you can.
• Standards support. Dozens of international standards are normatively referenced in the proposed changes, making DIS 29500 a well-socialized and well-connected member of the international standards family. A good example is the use of ISO/IEC 14977:1996 (Syntactic metalanguage – Extended BNF) notation for spreadsheet formulas and fields.
• Structural changes to allow for selective re-use of specific portions of the standard. One of the proposed changes would make OPC (Open Packaging Convention) and MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) separate parts, so that other standards can normatively reference these useful technologies separately from the rest of DIS 29500.
• Clarification of numerous details, including conformance requirements, algorithms, syntactical details, and much more.
• Correction of errors and typos that have made some of the details confusing in the past.

The next six weeks will be spent preparing for the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, which will be held at the end of February. Several delegations are attending from various national standards bodies here in Asia.

As we get closer to the BRM for DIS29500 in Geneva the team that form Ecma TC45 continue to work hard on building out their list of proposed dispositions to the comments that each of the national bodies put forwards last September.

On 7th January an additional 950 or so dispositions were posted to the TC45 portal, you’ll find more information in their status report; 

Today’s batch of proposed dispositions brings the total number of items TC45 has responded to thus far to 3252, or 92.3% of the 3,522 total comments received across all 87 voting countries who participated in the September 2007 ballot.

The report also talks a little about some of the work that has taken place over the last few weeks, proposing to support additional international standards and continuing to improve support for internationalisation in line with the comments put forwards by each of the national standards bodies;

Prior status reports (click here) contain information about some of the significant issues that we have reviewed over the past few months. This new batch of proposed dispositions includes some additional technical items – such as fully adopting the ISO standard ISO/IEC 10118-3 for password hashing and advances in internationalization – that we believe will also be welcomed by many of the National Body members participating in this process.

This means that TC45 continues to be on track to respond to every comment that was put forward on the 2nd September.

A number of sites are reporting that a further set of proposed dispositions have been posted to the Ecma web site for review by the national standards bodies and various technical committees.

Brian Jones, Microsoft’s representative on TC45 within Ecma, mentions on his blog that the committee has now looked at over half of the submitted comments and have constructive responses that talk about how those comments can be addressed.

With this drop of dispositions Ecma have begun to look at the subset of the more complex comments that were raised by the technical review phase of the fast track process, some of these will represent substantial changes to the specification, part of the TC45 status report on Ecma’s site details these suggestions.

You can find the full TC45 status report here, for ease of reading I have copied the text that talks about the specific changes that are being proposed;

Allowing for ISO-8601 Dates

ECMA-376, the original Open XML standard adopted by Ecma, assigned a unique numeric value to each date in a spreadsheet, in order to improve the speed of date calculations. Based on the comments received from some National Bodies on this issue, DIS 29500 will be updated to allow date values to be stored using the format defined by the ISO 8601 standard.

Internationalized handling of weekdays and weekends

ECMA-376 allowed for a week that begins on Sunday or Monday, but not a week that begins on any other day, such as Saturday. Ecma is proposing a comprehensive range of options for what is defined as the first day of the week, and what is defined as the weekend.

Language tags

ECMA-376 used a set of integer values to identify the language applied to regions of a document. Ecma is proposing that the language tags specified in the DIS should instead leverage an internationally recognized practice for representing languages, IETF BCP 47. IETF BCP 47 is a Best Current Practices document that incorporates use of the ISO 639 standard for languages, ISO 15924 for scripts, and ISO 3166 for regions. This proposal directly follows recommendations from National Bodies in several countries.

Page Borders

ECMA-376 included support for a variety of graphical elements that could be used as page borders. Several National Bodies noted that this closed list of graphical elements was not sufficiently diverse and global in its contents. Based on that feedback, Ecma is proposing to change the Open XML standard to allow for custom page borders. This will enable implementers to determine the best option for including borders relevant to their applications.

Usage of ISO standards for grammars

ECMA-376 used its own notation for defining the grammar for some of the more advanced functionality, such as spreadsheet formulas and word processing fields. Several National Bodies noted that the existing grammars in ECMA-376 are non-standard and were not fully described within the DIS. In response to this concern, Ecma proposes to revise the notation for spreadsheet formulas and fields to use an existing ISO standard. Formula notation will now use ISO/IEC 14977:1996 – Syntactic metalanguage – Extended BNF. This proposal improves the ability for implementers to test and validate conformance to the specification.

I have a couple of links for you this morning on the progress of the comment resolution process, as we head towards the DIS29500 Ballot Resolution Meeting at the end of February.

The first is to the web site of Ecma International who currently lead the work on the DIS29500 specification, Rex Jaeschke is the JTC1 project editor and Ecma’s TC45 is actively supporting his work.

From the Ecma International web site;

As outlined in news release dated 18 October 2007, Ecma is maintaining active involvement leading up to the ballot resolution meeting 25-29 February 2008 by supporting the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Editor, Rex Jaeschke, who has been tasked with producing a proposed disposition of all 3522 comments received during the ballot period, and by maintaining a web portal accessible by National Body members which will host current drafts of the proposed comment dispositions.

The second link is to Brian Jones’s blog. Brian is the Microsoft representative on the TC45 committee and is without doubt the closest person in the company to the work that is currently underway. He talks about how the TC is working through the comments, some of the work that has been done to address the commonality of comments from different countries, and how many dispositions are currently available for review by the various national bodies.

From Brian’s blog;

There are currently 662 responses, and the plan is to provide updates to this list every few weeks. We still have almost 2 months until the deadline, but given that we have a lot of issues to work though, we thought it would be best to provide the responses earlier than the Jan deadline to allow for more time to discuss the issues.

Needless to say, there is still a lot to be done in the lead up to the BRM. For each of the national bodies around the Asia Pacific region though it is probably a good idea to ensure that you have an opportunity to review all of the work coming out of Ecma at the moment in preparation for that meeting.