OSRIN.net

I’m surprised I missed this, I’ve been a little distracted by my recent move.

It seems that back on the 16th June OpenXPS, the Open XML Paper Specification, was approved as an ECMA standard by their 97th General Assembly meeting, OpenXPS will be known as ECMA-388.

A basic outline can be found on the specification download page;

This Standard defines OpenXPS, the Open XML Paper Specification. OpenXPS describes a set of conventions for the use of XML and other widely available technologies to describe the content and appearance of paginated documents. It is written for developers who are building systems that process OpenXPS content.

A primary goal is to ensure the interoperability of independently created software and hardware systems that produce or consume OpenXPS content. This Standard defines the requirements that systems processing OpenXPS Documents must satisfy in order to achieve interoperability.

This Standard describes a paginated-document format called the OpenXPS Document. The format requirements are an extension of the packaging requirements described in the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) Standard. That Standard describes packaging and physical format conventions for the use of XML, Unicode, ZIP, and other technologies and specifications, to organize the content and resources that make up any document. They are an integral part of the OpenXPS Standard, and are included by reference.

Many XML-based building blocks within OpenXPS make use of the conventions described in the Markup Compatibility and Extensibility Standard that is relied upon by the OPC Standard to facilitate future enhancement and extension of OpenXPS markup. As such, that Markup Compatibility and Extensibility Standard is included by reference.

The specification itself has yet to be posted, but will be available from this link once it is.

For those wanting to find out more, Stephen McGibbon provides pointers to an explanatory whitepaper in XPS and PDF format.

As part of his notes on the recent SC34 plenary meeting in Prague Alex Brown has offered a few comments on his views of OpenXML (and in a small part ODF) one year after the ratification of IS29500 by ISO.

The maintenance of OpenXML within ISO appears to be moving forward well.

From Alex’s blog post;

Overall, WG 4 is making excellent progress. To date, 169 defects have been collected for OOXML (check out the defect log) and the majority of these have either been closed, or a resolution agreed. Amendments were started for 3 of the 4 parts of OOXML to allow a bunch of small corrections to be put in place, and the even-more-minor problems will be fixed by publishing technical corrigenda. Overall, I think stakeholders in OOXML can feel pretty confident that the Standard is being sensibly and efficiently maintained.

I was personally very pleased to see National Bodies well-represented (the attendance list is here [tbc]) – to the extent that I’d now ideally like to see some more big vendors coming to the table so their views can be heard. Microsoft (of course) was; but where (for example) are Apple, Oracle and the other vendors who participated in Ecma TC 45 while OOXML was being drafted? To them – and to anybody who wants to get involved in this important work – I say: participate!

Over at Rick Jelliffe’s blog Rick has been carrying out something of an exposé of the unfortunate imbalance in the stakeholders represented in the maintenance of ODF at OASIS (something which will become even more acute if Sun is, in the end, snapped-up by IBM). Personally I think Rick is right that it is vitally important to have a good mix of voices at the standardisation table: big vendors, small vendors, altruistic experts, users, government representatives, etc. WG 4 is getting there, but it too has some way to go.

The international participation in the IS29500 maintenance process appears to be both climbing and broadening beyond the original actors.

Regular readers will be aware of the Document Interoperability Initiative and the associated workshops that the DII has been running around the world.

We have been talking for a while now about running one of those workshops in South East Asia, and we finally have a date for it. The intention is to run a DII workshop in Singapore on March 16th and 17th.

For now we are starting to think about topics that would be valuable to discuss during the time that we have. Initial ideas include looking at China’s Uniform Office Format (UOF) and how it interoperates with other document formats, along with spending some time looking at the extensive work that has been taking place with DAISY in the region.

Any other ideas are welcome, please feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments of this post or hit the “contact” button on the right and send me an email.

I’ll share the venue details a little closer to the time, it will most likely be in a hotel somewhere in Singapore’s CBD. Like previous workshops attendance is open to anybody who is interested, and conversations will be as interactive as possible.

From the ECMA press release;

On Thursday, December 4, 2008 the Ecma General Assembly voted to approve International Standard (IS) ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML) as ECMA-376 Edition 2.

Office Open XML is an open standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets that is intended to be implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. A primary rationale behind the standard is to ensure the long-term preservation of documents to maintain compatibility with continuing advances in the field of information technology.

The work to standardize Office Open XML started in December 2005 in Ecma International via its Technical Committee 45 (TC45), which included representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the United States Library of Congress.

This means that IS29500 and ECMA-376 are now aligned, so all the changes that occurred within the spec as revision one of the ECMA standard went through ISO approval are now rolled back into the original document.

The press release just appeared on their site;

ISO/IEC 29500 is a standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets that is intended to be implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. One of its objectives is to ensure the long-term preservation of documents created over the last two decades using programmes that are becoming incompatible with continuing advances in the field of information technology.

The release explains the four parts of the standard that have been published, and how to find them.

The ISO catalogue entry for IS29500 explains that the documents can be downloaded for free from the ITTF. Here are the links for parts 1, 2, 3 & 4.

My colleague Eric White from our developer group has been quite prolific over the last few months, his blog focuses on LINQ, XML and of course Open XML.

He posts frequently, and sometime over the last week has been kind enough to compile a table of contents for his recent work. The entire ToC is here, I’ve pulled out his Open XML focused posts below.

Open XML

Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML

Transforming Open XML Documents using XSLT

Transforming Open XML Documents to Flat OPC Format

Transforming Flat OPC Format to Open XML Documents

The Flat OPC Format

Creating Data-Bound Content Controls using the Open XML SDK and LINQ to XML

Create a List of All Parts in an Open XML Document

OpenXmlCodeTester: Validating Code in Open XML Documents

Using LINQ to XML to Retrieve Content Controls in Word 2007

Remove Comments

Remove Personal Information

Accept Revisions

Automated Processing of Open XML Documents using PowerShell

Extract Comments

OpenXML Content Types in an XML Document

Bulk Convert DOC to DOCX

The Legacy Hashing Algorithm in Open XML

Automated Processing of Open XML Documents using PowerShell

Those of you still following the drama that relates to the standardization of OpenXML will probably have caught a story in the Inquirer earlier this week that announced that thirteen of the twenty three members of the Standards Norway document format group had walked out in protest over the countries OpenXML vote.

NORWEGIAN MEMBERS of the Technical Committee of that country’s International Standards Organisation (ISO) body Standard Norge have resigned their posts to protest the approval of Microsoft’s OOXML document formats proposal in defiance of the majority recommendation.

In all, 13 of the committee’s 23 members have resigned, a majority of the membership.

On the face of it this is pretty dramatic stuff.

Rick Jelliffe spent a little time trying to work out what had happened and who these thirteen committee members were.

His conclusion;

So if we take these 13, and subtract people who either work for competitors of Microsoft or affiliated with the NUUG/FOSS industry/community, we get…1 person (the esteemed Steve Pepper) by my count.

Of course, affiliation does not mean bought or rote votes: I am the last person to think that, except perhaps for people without technical competence. ODF’s Patrick Durusau, for example, is paid by Sun but his value is largely that he is independent and knowledgeable. And even parrots have value, if they fairly advocate their stakeholder’s view. (Of course, most people like to consider themselves mavericks, even when violently agreeing with each other and the conventional wisdom of their peers.)

But all that being said, I tend to think that a walkout by [people who see themselves as commercial and non-commercial] competitors may generate more scepticism, fairly or unfairly, than, say, a walk-out by prospective users.

The whole post is worth a read, as are the comments.

One in particular from Fredrik E. Nilsen sheds some light on what might really be going on;

12 of the 13 members who walked out (all except Steve Pepper) joined Standard Norge K/185 when the OOXML-process started.

Lars Marius Garshol is a long time member of SN K/185 and has commented the situation at Arstechnica:

“What’s happened here is that lots of people joined the committee to oppose the standard, and while in the committee that’s all they’ve done. Now that OOXML has been approved, they no longer have any reason to be in the committee, so they are leaving. That’s hardly the committee imploding.

It is actually a great shame. Many minds came together to work on the process to standardize OpenXML bringing a wide array of relevant expert opinions. In many cases there was disagreement, but I have always held the view that there was a lot to be gained from the debate.

Doug Mahugh is carrying an announcement of the next in the series of workshops that we’re running in Redmond to support the Document Interoperability Initiative, this time looking at OpenXML Implementation and Interoperability.

The workshop will be held on the Microsoft Redmond Campus on the 24th and 25th October. I managed to attend the last one, which covered ODF and Office SP2, and it was a great opportunity to talk directly with the product groups about what they’re doing in this area.

Doug talks a about why we’re doing this and how to sign up if you are interested, as with the last DII workshop it is open to anybody who wants to attend.

We heard from some of the attendees of the July workshop that they’d like to see a similar event around Open XML interop, and that’s why we’re doing this event. It will be in Redmond again because that’s the only way we can realistically get multiple Office PMs involved, and attendees of the July event found the direct interaction with our technical experts to be very useful. This workshop is not restricted to Open XML interop (and certainly not just to our own implementation of Open XML), however, so any other document interop topics can be added to the agenda, time permitting.

Like the last workshop, this is a free event that is part of the Document Interoperability Initiative, and the goal is to share information with the developer community and solicit feedback on how we can work together to improve interoperability. To register for the event, send me your name, email, and company/organization via this contact form, and we’ll follow up with more details including hotel recommendations and related information.

He also mentions that the date is the Thursday and Friday before PDC in LA, which will make it easier for PDC attendees to join this session.

Both Doug Mahugh and Eric White have some info on this, version 2.0 of the SDK for Open XML is now available as a CTP, you’ll find it here.

Some of the new features include;

The OpenXmlDiff utility identifies differences in the markup in two Open XML documents.

The Open XML Class Explorer helps you determine which strongly typed class to use for a specific task, and includes the text of the relevant section of the ECMA-376 spec for each class.

The Open XML Document Reflector takes a target document as input, and with a few clicks it shows you the C# code needed to generate that document (or a section of it) with the Open XML SDK. This tool will be a huge time-saver for those who need to write code to generate documents to match a template defined by others.

Patrick Durusau has posted a couple of his now characteristic PDFs since the end of the IS29500 appeals process.

It is worth taking a moment to read both of them;

http://www.durusau.net/publications/listening.pdf

OOXML has been approved by a super-majority of those eligible to vote, appeals have been denied and yet the cry: “You’re Not LISTENING TO ME!” goes on. I don’t normally restrict my posts to one type reader but if you have never raised teenagers, please stop reading here.

The second talks to an issue that was articulated well during the process to standardize IS29500, but seems to have lost some momentum in the blogosphere during recent weeks.

http://www.durusau.net/publications/reform.pdf

Rob Weir (IBM) gets it right when he notes that the JTC 1 Directives are in serious need of repair. Those rules are the results of twenty plus years of effort by IBM and others. Whatever brought about the sudden realization at IBM that the JTC 1 Directives are deeply defective (post ODF approval apparently) isn’t as important as the shape of the needed reform.

They key to the second one will be keeping broad representation from the ICT industry involved in the standards process, something I know we’re all keen to do.