Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Cast your mind back to last November and you may remember Microsoft committing to working with the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium to produce a translator to their DAISY XML file format (translating WordprocessingML to Daisy DTBooks format), this allows anybody with OpenXML files to convert them for use with a wide array of assistive technologies.

I’m pleased to say that as of today the translator is available, and will run either in the shell in Windows (right click to translate, just like the ODF translator) or will integrate well with Microsoft Office.

From the Microsoft press release;

Microsoft Corp. today joined with industry and advocacy group leaders worldwide to launch new software that will make it easier for anyone to create documents and content that will be accessible for blind and print-disabled individuals. The new “Save as DAISY XML” add-in, designed for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP, will allow users to save Open XML-based text files into DAISY XML, the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content (www.daisy.org).

It is also worth noting that the code for the translator is up on SourceForge if anybody wants to go take a look for themselves, again from the press release; 

The “Save as DAISY XML” add-in was created through an open source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd. and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium and can be downloaded by Microsoft Office Word users for free at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy.

The open source nature of the Open XML to DAISY XML translation project enables technologists to utilize the source code and other resources for their own applications. As Open XML adoption continues to expand across the software industry for use on various platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS and the Palm OS, solution providers interested in creating their own Open XML to DAISY XML translators can reference information available through the SourceForge open source project site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml-daisy.

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.

ZDNet UK this morning carried a story headlined “Microsoft Office 2007 fails OOXML conformance test“, and in a subheading explains;

Word documents generated by today’s version of Microsoft Office 2007 do not conform to the Office Open XML standard under development by the International Organization for Standardization, according to tests run by a document standards specialist.

Given that the recent ISO process to standardize OpenXML took significant amounts of feedback around the details of the specification and made changes based on that feedback this shouldn’t really be all that much of a revelation.

Knowing that the specification evolved significantly as it moved from Ecma 376 to IS29500, there should be no dispute that there are differences between the Ecma-376 documents produced by Microsoft Office today and the final IS29500 specification.

The ZDNet news story is generated based on a blog post that Alex Brown posted on his companies site a few days ago, he opens with;

I was excited to receive from Murata Makoto a set of the RELAX NG schemas for the (post-BRM) revision of OOXML, and thought it would be interesting to validate some real-world content against them, to get a rough idea of how non-conformant the standardisation of 29500 had made MS Office 2007.

Alex goes on to look at how the specification document for Ecma-376 (an Office 2007 document) conforms to the post BRM details of the specification now known as ISO/IEC IS29500.

He states in his post that he is doing this to “to get a rough idea of how non-conformant the standardisation of 29500 had made MS Office 2007“, and much as you might expect the document does not conform to a standard that didn’t exist at the time when the document was originally created.

At the end of his post Dr Brown asks “What’s next?”

To repeat the exercise with ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (ODF 1.0) and a popular implementation of OpenDocument. Will anybody be brave enough to predict what kind of result that exercise will have?

We’ll see.

My colleague Doug Mahugh took a closer look at Dr. Brown’s post and offers some of his own commentary on the unsurprising outcome of the tests that Alex did. 

He opens with…

It’s an interesting question. Office 2007 supported the ECMA-376 standard, but many changes were made during the evolution from ECMA-376 to IS29500. How many of those changes affect the content in a typical large document?

… and later in the post goes on to say…

The results were predictable: the document was not conformant to either class. Changes made at the BRM are not yet reflected in any existing implementations, and in this case the Ecma spec was created over a year before those changes were made. Here are the totals:

• Validation against the strict schemas: 122,000 errors
• Validation against the transitional schemas: 84 errors

Office 2007 was designed to be highly compatible with existing documents, so it uses features of Open XML that provide backward compatibility, including many of the elements and attributes that were moved to “transitional status” as a result of the BRM. So the test of strict conformance, although interesting, is a bit abstract: it’s testing whether a document conforms to a subset of the spec that was defined after the document was created.

The second number is the more meaningful one. Those are places in the test document where something is done in a way that doesn’t match the final IS29500 spec. Alex provides one specific example, to show the types of changes caught by that test: an attribute with a value of “on” that should say “true” instead, due to “one of the many tidying-up exercises performed at the BRM.”

So where exactly does Microsoft stand on the issue of conformance of Microsoft Office 2007 with the final IS29500 specification?

Chris Capossela (Microsoft’s Senior VP for Office) addressed this in an open letter around a month ago by saying;

We’ve listened to the global community and learned a lot, and we are committed to supporting the Open XML specification that is approved by ISO/IEC in our products.

It is coming… Microsoft is committed to supporting the ISO/IEC standard for OpenXML!

As an aside, Doug’s post closes with a comment about two of this years winners of the Google Summer of Code;

Google recently unveiled the winning entries in Google’s Summer of Code 2008, a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Two of this year’s winners are enhancements to the Open XML implementation in AbiWord.

Well, vacations can be fun but at some point the holiday has to end and you have to return to work…

I’m sat here trying to catch up on everything from over the last two weeks.

For the first time in as long as I remember this vacation involved me leaving both my laptop and phone at home and in effect falling completely off the face of the digital planet.

It was as good and relaxing as I expected to be away from communication for a few days, but I’m not sure I fully thought through the implications of the workload I would face when I returned!

Several thousand emails, several thousand unread articles on the Internet and what feels like several thousand hours worth of meeting requests hovering around.

Sifting through the OpenXML related headlines not a lot appears to have changed in the last couple of weeks. Groklaw and Slashdot are still faintly buzzing with the same stories as the start of last month.

Jason Matusow has been engaged in a number of vibrant discussions around the role of IP in standards creation and usage, the comments being expressed on several of his recent posts are making for a good overall discussion. His most recent entry brings some of those conversations together.

One of the most challenging aspects to the threads I’ve been reading in the responses to my post (and I see this in the Groklaw post as well) is that many issues are getting squashed together - and that is the very basis of misunderstanding these issues.

He also has posted some details of the next steps in Microsoft’s commitments to the Interoperability Principles that were published earlier this year.

Continuing with the theme of publishing protocol related information for high volume products some 14,000 more pages of documentation has been posted to the web.

The documentation is for:

• Protocols between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office client applications
• Protocols between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and other Microsoft server products
• Protocols between Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook
• Protocols between Microsoft Office 2007 client applications and other Microsoft server products

Alex Brown has written about the process that ISO’s SC34 is going through to take full control of OpenXML following on from the recent SC34 meeting in Oslo;

Now however, the whole process moves forward into a much more significant stage. At the just-finished SC 34 meeting in Oslo a number of resolutionswere passed relating to 29500. The most significant of these is resolution 4, “Creation of Ad Hoc Group 1 on ISO/IEC 29500 Maintenance”, and it’s worth looking at it in some detail. I will go through the complete resolution below with some explanation of my own …

You should read Alex’s full post for further information, as might be expected there is a lively conversation taking place in the comments.

On a “less process, more technical” note, the April CTP version of the OpenXML SDK is now available, and Erika Ehrli has all the details.

The Open XML Format SDK Technology Preview simplifies the task of manipulating Open XML packages. The Open XML Application Programming Interface (API) encapsulates many common tasks that developers perform on Open XML packages, so you can perform complex operations with just a few lines of code. Using this API, you can programmatically generate and manipulate Word 2007 documents, Excel 2007 spreadsheets, and PowerPoint 2007 presentations. The programming model uses managed code, so it’s safe for server-side scenarios.

… Erika goes on to talk a little about the future of the SDK…

The Open XML API will release in two versions. Open XML API Version 1.0 is the updated version of the CTP in June 2007 and will only contain the Open XML Packaging API. Open XML API Version 2.0 will contain all of the Open XML API components, including the Open XML Packaging API with further updates. It will enforce validity of the content either in the original Open XML documents or being generated through this API. The purpose of this plan is to give out the long awaited Go-Live license of the existing Open XML Packaging API to external developers.

She is looking for feedback from developers on the path that the SDK is taking, so please consider joining the conversation on her blog.

Finally, ISO/IEC have published an FAQ that talks about the process that IS29500 has been through, you’ll find it here.

The FAQ looks at many of the questions that have been raised over the last fifteen months and offers a direct ISO/IEC response.

It ends with a high level question about the process itself.

Will ISO and IEC review how ISO/IEC 29500 was adopted?

We reviewed the process before it started, all the while during its course and afterwards as well. While the voting on ISO/IEC 29500 has attracted exceptional publicity, it needs to be put in context. ISO and IEC have collections of more than 17 000 and 7 000 successful standards respectively, these being revised and added to every month. This suggests that the standards development process is credible, works well and is delivering the standards needed, and widely implemented, by the market. Because continual improvement is an underlying aim of standardization, ISO and IEC will certainly be continuing to review and improve its standards development procedures.

I guess it is time I stopped hiding in Live Writer and reading other peoples blogs, I should get back to clearing out my overflowing Inbox… more tomorrow.

As we know, last Wednesday ISO/IEC announced that DIS29500 had gained enough votes for it to pass the ratification process and become IS29500.

The last week has been a quiet one for me personally, I have spent most of it clearing up many of my badly neglected admin tasks interspersed with reading news stories and blogs that document the ongoing OpenXML conversations.

Groklaw and Slashdot are buzzing away quietly with various stories, looking for conspiracies in the darkest corners of the internet. Some of the news stories are focusing on the facts, some are praising Microsoft for the steps we have taken over the last two years, others are predictably saying that we have not yet gone far enough. Give us time on the last point, we still have a lot to learn and even more to do.

A few of the blog entries caught my attention along the way.

Jan van den Beld, the former Secretary General of Ecma has been blogging for a while now, I have highlighted a couple of his posts already.

His most recent post reflects on the process, how strong the support for OpenXML is globally and what he describes as the hypocrisy of those who are still pushing back on the tremendous amount of hard work that has been applied by so many over the last fifteen months.

This is a resounding collective voice of support from countries around the world, including the four largest IT markets: the US, Japan, Germany and the UK. Is there any other document format standard that has received such widespread support from the global community? No. This was not a close vote – Open XML won by a healthy margin. Only ten markets voted against ratification, and in a number of those there were strong voices in support of Open XML. By any measure this is a clear statement of support for ratification after a very careful review process that rivals any other standards review in history.

… he goes on to talk about some of the negative voices that are currently echoing around the blogosphere.

These direct attacks on the integrity or national standards bodies are without merit. They reflect a lack of understanding of how standards are developed and how standards bodies operate, or are a cynical attempt to spin things now that 61 countries have decided not to follow their hotly delivered directions. Understandably, national standards bodies are striking back, protecting their hard-earned and well deserved reputations from this smear campaign.

Jason Matusow has posted some related comments, he talks a little about participation in the national standards bodies and highlights the fact that lots of people from all parts of the industry have come to the table to participate in the conversations around DIS29500, many of whom were not there two years ago.

He highlights some examples where IBM and Google have come late to the party, along with the fact that they have as valid a voice as anybody else at the table, providing the NB rules allow their participation.

In Norway when IBM and Google join the committee 2 days before the final vote…or when IBM brings a subsidiary company to the table with them in Italy effectively giving one company 2 votes…or when Oracle and Red Hat join the US V1 committee just before it votes….that is participation, right? I actually believe that to be true. It is no different than Microsoft or its business partners coming to the table to have their voices be heard in the process. As long as the participation is within the context of the rules for a given NB, then it is legitimate participation.

From a personal point of view, I say the more the merrier.

My only hope from here is that the many industry voices who have turned up for these discussions in local committees stay engaged as further specifications are brought to the table, regardless of who submits them or how they’re submitted.

Finally, Miguel de Icaza talks a little about the progress that has been made by Microsoft during the process to standardize OpenXML, I would like to think that whatever your personal views are around the process or the specification that some goodness has come out of this for the entire community.

Speaking as a Microsoft employee I see an amazingly strong commitment at all levels of the company to get our participation in the standards processes right, to change the company in whatever way is needed and to ensure that we continue to have a strong, interoperable and participatory role in the community and the industry as it evolves from here.

Here are just some of those steps, as highlighted by Miguel.

1. The specifications for the old binary file formats were published under the OSP (February of 2008).

2. The above documents were backed up by the British Library in case Microsoft ever stops publishing them (announcement).

3. Microsoft is funding the development of a translator between the old binary file formats and OOXML which should assist folks that have experience in one format and want to understand the other, or just want to convert documents back and forth. If your app lacked support for OOXML, but had support for the old formats, you can use these tools.

4. Microsoft agreed that future versions of OOXML will be covered by the OSP a concern that some people had about future versions of the document.

5. Microsoft pledged to modify future versions of Office to implement the ISO version of OOXML.

6. working group was created to look into harmonization of OOXML and ODF, something that many developers involved in office suites have been advocating for a long time.

7. Microsoft pledged to support features to support other file formats as native file formats in their office suite:

Last year we sponsored a translator project that gave people the ability to read and write ODF files from Microsoft Office. Last month we announced that we would update the Office product so that the ODF translators could natively plug into Office and give people the same options they get from the other file formats. People will be able to set ODF as the default format in Office if that’s what they want by simply installing the translators and then changing their settings.

8. Lots of clarifications went into the spec, and people should be happy about that.

9. And finally, now that OOXML is an ISO standard, as Patrick Durusau implied there are many winners.

If you’re looking for a real conspiracy - for the last two years my wife and I have been planning a trip to Africa, we leave tonight and will be gone for two weeks… with the process to standardize OpenXML now complete it will not conflict with my vacation.

I can assure you that the completion date for the OpenXML standardization process was not planned with my vacation in mind, or was it?

ISO/IEC have now posted their press release, click this link for the full text.

ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, has received the necessary number of votes for approval as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

Approval required at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of ISO/IEC national body votes cast to be negative. These criteria have now been met with 75 % of the JTC 1 participating member votes cast positive and 14 % of the total of national member body votes cast negative.

The 30-day period during which ISO/IEC national bodies had the opportunity to reconsider their votes on the draft ISO/IEC DIS 29500 closed at midnight on Saturday, 29 March 2008, with the result that the criteria for approval of the document as an ISO/IEC International Standard have now been met.

The breakdown of the votes for those of us here in Asia can be found in an earlier post.

A press release from Ecma International, the organization who submitted DIS29500 to ISO, is now up on the web all but confirming the information that was widely leaked on the Internet yesterday.

You’ll find the full statement by following this link;

IS 29500 marks the culmination of joint development efforts over the past two years by the members of Ecma Technical Committee 45 (TC45) and through its subsequent submission of the Ecma International specification to the ISO/IEC process for additional input from the global standards community.

“ISO/IEC approval maximizes the ability of independent software vendors such as NextPage to deliver solutions to customers who have existing binary documents,” said Tom Ngo, CTO of NextPage and member of Ecma TC45. “As the sole representative of ISVs on TC45, we worked hard to foster interoperability and conformance conditions that help to level the competitive playing field. This approval puts control of Open XML in the hands of the international community.”

“Just as we have worked to establish and steward our print collections, the British Library is committed to preserving and providing access to the U.K.’s digital heritage,” said Adam Farquhar, head of   Digital Library Technology at the British Library, and vice-chair of Ecma TC45. “Establishing Office Open XML as an open standard substantially enhances our ability to achieve this. It’s an important step forward for digital preservation and will help us fulfill the British Library’s core responsibility of making our digital collections accessible for generations to come.”

“The U.S. Library of Congress believes that the preservation of digital content for future generations will be much easier if widely used software applications use formats with full public specifications that will be maintained by the global community going forward,” said Martha Anderson, Director of Program Management, National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. “The approval of Office Open XML as an international standard has important benefits for libraries and other archival institutions for generations to come.”

All that remains now is to wait for an official announcement from ISO which I’m told we should expect to see later today.

Looking at the results from the ISO that seem to be poping up all over the web it appears that DIS29500 has now become a fully ratified as an ISO standard.

I’m sure that my colleagues will talk at length about what this means from here for the file format standard, a bright and exciting future where the world can look at issues like interoperability with other file formats and technologies in an environment where the specification is under the stewardship of a global community.

I will add links at the bottom of this post as they appear over the coming few hours.

When I look at the outcome of the voting here in the Asia Pacific region I’m personally less interested in the vote itself, and more interested in what the vote that each country cast teaches me.

Each vote might suggest that the process did a good job of listening to a country’s comments and responding well to them, in other cases it might suggest to me that the process was less understanding of a particular country’s needs and highlight areas where we still have work to do. In other cases where I know the process did a good job with the requirements of a particular country it may offer some level of insight into interpersonal relationships and the weight that they carry.

Whichever way, the vote outcome has the potential to help me in my role at Microsoft, and to help Microsoft work out how to do a better job of working in every country where we have a subsidiary.

The relevance of OpenXML as a key piece of technology and the way in which the community did or didn’t embrace it in each country is one interesting indicator that helps us understand a little more about our overall platform and our company as a whole in that particular geography.

Anyway, the final vote outcome for the countries here in Asia Pacific is outlined in the table below, along with the original position that each of the countries took on at the end of the technical evaluation period on September 2nd;

Overall this represents four countries in Asia Pacific who have moved from DISAPPROVE to APPROVE, and nine countries who have stayed with the decision that they made on September 2nd, six of those were already an APPROVE or an ABSTAIN.

Only India, China and New Zealand decided to stay with their position of voting DISAPPROVE for OpenXML.

When I look back on the last year’s events it is amazing how much we have learned as a company.

A year ago only a select number of individuals understood the process of standardization or how those processes worked in their individual countries. Today the number of individuals who understand and care about standards within Microsoft is probably in the thousands.

When it comes to living up the commitments that we made in the recent announcement about Interoperability Principles the work over the last year with OpenXML is a good start. There is a lot more for us to do though, and I sincerely hope that everybody who I have had the honour to work with in the past year stays as engaged over the next.

While I know it sounds trite, I’m genuinely looking forward to continuing the many discussions that we have started across the region, and very excited to see where those discussions take us.

Other posts on the final outcome of the process;

Microsoft Press Release, Brian Jones, Jason Matusow, Stephen McGibbon, Andy Updegrove, Jerry Fishenden, Gray Knowlton

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.  - Mark Twain

While people have been waiting for the official results from ISO the blogosphere has been buzzing with all sorts of stories about what did and didn’t happen in a few of the countries as they decided upon their final positions for DIS29500.

Two of the countries that seem to have got the most airtime are Germany and Norway, and we’ve seen both of those standards bodies come out with statements over the last 48 hours.

When this process began I remember receiving some very sage advice from one employee of a national body here in the region, she talked to be about how her organization was highly skilled in dealing with extreme conflict as they made very complex decisions.

At the time I remember thinking that she was exaggerating a little, but having witnessed some of the upset expressed by individuals who didn’t get the result that they wanted over the last few days, and the crowds of people willing to take their words as gospel, I now fully understand the advice she was sharing with me.

So, here are links to two of the standards bodies who have posted releases over the last few days explaining their process and the how they reached their final decision.

First of all DIN in Germany, I mentioned their press release in my last post. They begin with;

The reports currently circulating the Internet regarding voting procedures in DIN’s Standards Committee on Information Technology and Selected IT Applications (NIA) on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 “Office Open XML file formats” are false and misleading.

… and they go on to say;

On 11 March 2008 the NIA working committee responsible for technical aspects of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 held a vote to decide whether the “YES with comments” vote of September 2007 should be maintained as a “YES” vote or changed to a “NO” vote, taking the results of the Ballot Resolution Meeting held in February as a basis for their decision. As correctly reported by an unofficial source, the result of the March 11 vote was 14 to 5 in favour of adopting ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO Standard. Only the external experts who make up the responsible working committee voted on this matter; DIN as such has no vote on technical content in working committees.

NIA’s Steering Committee was NOT called upon to review, and possibly override, the working committee’s technical decision - it does not have the authority to do so. It was, however, involved in a decision as to whether or not the voting procedure at ISO correctly adhered to the formal criteria. Because the Steering Committee’s decision did not relate to any technical issues or the content of the standard itself, but dealt solely with the formalities of the JTC 1 “fast track” procedure, i.e. adherence to procedural rules in the standardization process, DIN felt it was necessary to take a position on this matter. This is the reason the DIN staff member participated in the voting procedure and did not abstain, as is the rule in questions of technical content.

On 27 March 2008 the NIA Steering Committee members who were entitled to vote did NOT vote on approval or non-approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an International Standard, but SOLELY on the regularity of the voting procedure itself. With a majority of 7 to 6, and 7 abstentions, the Steering Committee deemed the procedure as being in conformity with the rules, and thus had no reason to override the working committee’s “YES” vote. Had the majority of the Steering Committee been convinced that the procedures for developing and voting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 were in any way irregular, the German vote would have been changed to “ABSTAIN”.

The second, and most recent release comes from Standards Norge in a press release titled “Standard Norges behandling av OOXML for avstemming i ISO“.

Updated 4/4/08, 8am: Stephen McGibbon has a translation, he tells me that he will replace this text if there is an official English version published by Standards Norge - watch his blog for updates.

Stephen has now updated his post with a translation directly from Standards Norge, you will find it here, or directly from Standards Norge here.

The original text that he and I had both posted has been moved to a seperate page here.

As it turns out making decisions around supporting or not supporting a standard is a complex business.

If you’re interested in reading further, Jan van den Beld talks at length in his most recent post about the value of standardization bodies and why they operate the way that they do.

Related posts: Jason Matusow

Reuters is reporting that we’ll have to wait another day before we see the final outcome of the DIS29500 ballot from ISO, the reason given seems pretty rational when you consider the level of the noise in the blogosphere at the moment.

“Because ISO needs first to inform its worldwide membership of national standards bodies of these results, a press release on this subject will be issued on Wednesday, 2 April, 2008,” ISO spokesman Roger Frost said in an e-mail message.

Microsoft have responded with a “holding statement“, given that lots of people are asking and there isn’t really much to say until we see a final result.

“We respect ISO’s desire to first inform its National Body members and all the people who have worked so hard during this process. This has been a remarkable process, involving literally thousands of technical experts, technology consumers, and governments in 87 countries, whose input has helped to improve Ecma’s submitted Open XML standard. Out of respect for the standards process, we will not comment before the final results are known.”

And from DIN, the German national standards body a direct statement addressing allegations that have been thrown at them and their decision making process over the last few days.

The reports currently circulating the Internet regarding voting procedures in DIN’s Standards Committee on Information Technology and Selected IT Applications (NIA) on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 “Office Open XML file formats” are false and misleading.

On the final point, if I have learned one thing over the last year it is that the decision making processes involved in standards creation are complex ones.

While many people seem to believe that they are the final decision maker, when you dig into the process it is only in very few countries where one group or one committee get to make the final and complete decision on what the countries vote will be.

Finally, Patrick Durusau brings a little levity to the moment with his latest post, a non-standard guide to standards behaviour.

The following is a short guide to behaviour in standards committees and standards making in general.

1. Disparage the honesty (intellectual or moral) of others.
2. Disagreement with you is always the result of evil plans and designs.
3. Compromise is just another word for cowardice.
4. Rules should be followed, but only when to your advantage.
5. Chairs, conveners, editors, should be serve only so long as their views agree with yours.
6. People change positions but only by selling out.
7. People who agree with your opponents are clones/whores/lackies.
8. People who agree with you are besieged servants of truth, justice and human rights.
9. Never forget past transgressions, both real and imagined.
10. Remember to always point out the failures of others.

He then goes on to say.

Writing useful standards requires us to move beyond such behaviours.

I have not included examples of those behaviours because that simply starts the cycle all over again. We need to dust ourselves off and resolve to do better in the future and then simply to do so.

There is no profit (if you are of the commercial persuasion) or future (if you are one of the save the world types) or good work (if you are simply trying to write good standards) in pawing over old hurts.

Sound advice.