Fwd: [LINK] and it's Australia's turn on August 9

[Tom Worthington]

At 04:06 PM 25/07/2007, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>... Couldn't find it or the relevant committee at 
>http://www.standards.org.au ...

The British Standards Institute have taken the innovative step of 
using a Wiki to help prepare input on how the UK should vote on ISO 
ballot on Office Open XML/OOXML ( DIS 29500) 
<http://www.xmlopen.org/ooxml-wiki/>. I have sent a message to 
Standards Australia asking which committee is looking after it and 
that they might do something similar (I am the ACS representative on 
the Council of SA).

There is a set of very carefully prepared detailed comments on the 
draft standard 
<http://www.xmlopen.org/ooxml-wiki/index.php/DIS_29500_Comments>. The 
comments typically are suggesting that proprietary and obsolete 
Microsoft features in the standard be replaced with non-proprietary 
and more up to date ones. An example is to replace an old hash 
algorithm from Excell with a more robust one 
<http://www.xmlopen.org/ooxml-wiki/index.php/2._WordprocessingML_Reference_Material#3.3.1.69_.5Bp2004.2C_hashing_algorithm_.5D>. 
The comments get a little cheeky at times, such as suggesting a 
"doWrongDateCalculationsLikeExcel" tag. But as far as I can see these 
changes are feasible and would make the standard better at the cost 
of causing some minor inconvenience to Microsoft.

However, there is already an XML based international standard for 
office document formats: OpenDocument  ISO/IEC 26300:2006 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument>. ODF has similar 
functionality to the proposed OOXML. If OOXML needs changes to make 
it suitable as an international standard, then its major feature 
(compatibility with Microsoft Office) is lost.

There is work already underway to provide translation between 
Microsoft Office OOXML and the ODF International Standard format 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/07/microsoft-office-openxml-to-odf.html>. 
When such a translation available, Microsoft Office users can then 
use the existing international standard format. There would therefore 
be no need top adopt OOXML as an international standard.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml