[LINK] Australia abstains on Office Open XML vote

[Glen Turner]

On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 08:26 +1000, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

>  From memory, you were concerned about the fast track process - shoving the
> standard through. An abstention says, to me, that Australia isn't ready to take
> a position on the proposed standard. This seems an accurate assessment and response.

I was concerned that the Fast Track Process allowed a obviously
deficient specification to make it well down the ISO standards
track.

Australia should have voted No with Comments because the Draft 
specification was obviously deficient. Standards Australia had quite
a few Comments describing deficiencies in the Draft on which there
was consensus from all but the specification's author.

What Standards Australia did not have is a consensus that the Draft
should be approved.  So its options were Abstain or Disapprove with
Comment. There is no "Abstain with Comment" option.

So the only way open to Standards Australia to present the comments
it received to ISO was a Disapprove with Comments, perhaps with a
plan to move to Approve once those Comments has been resolved.

Standards Australia's Abstain vote is really only justifiable if
it received no substantive Comments. This is not the case, Standards
Australia received a large number of substantive comments.

> Instead of having two international standards covering the same area - perhaps
> the position Australia should take is to work from the currently adopted
> standard and understand its relation to any other proposals.

That would be the usual approach. But the Fast Track process is
not a usual standards development process with a working group
and authority to alter the Draft.

A Fast Track specification succeeds or fails pretty much as it
is.  The Ballot Resolution Meeting has about a week to make some
substantive changes. Considering that almost every spreadsheet
function is poorly specified (they are a dump of the Microsoft
help text, not a specification) the BRM doesn't have a hope of
addressing all of the substantive Comments.

The only way OOXML will get through is if the BRM process
itself is subverted.  Microsoft seem to be setting out to do
exactly that.

As far as merging OOXML into ODF, I don't think that is necessary.
A great deal of care was taking during ODF's development to allow
for straight-forward representation of Microsoft Office documents
(for example, the semantics for table layout match those used in
Word).  So merging the features of OOXML into ODF simply results
in ODF.

I view requests for a merger from standards bodies as a search
for a compromise. Motivating the compromise is a desire for the
quiet life that standards bodies enjoyed before the arrival of
Microsoft's hard-headed business people.

I think those standards bodies are kidding themselves. The
quiet life is not returning any time soon. ECMA are preparing
to launch Microsoft's "Adobe PDF killer" specification down
the ISO Fast Track.

> It would be of practical use to understand/articulate the 
> relationship/role/application of
> OOXML,
> HTML versions3-5,
> PDF...
> to ODF

PDF is a pre-press representation of pages.
HTML is a mark-up language for hypermedia text, tuned to screen display
OOXML and ODF are formats for "office documents" -- word processing,
spreadsheets, presentations, formulas, etc.

If you think about a footnote you'll see how they differ.
 PDF is concerned about the position and font.
 HTML is concerned about the text and linking to the footnote.
 ODF and OOXML are concerned about the semantics of the footnote
 (is it auto-numbered, what style sheet, etc)