The open source industry may be on the brink of waging a standards war against Microsoft, but the software giant says it just wants to play nice.
ZDNet Asia's open source blogger Peter Junge bemoaned the implications of Microsoft's document standard Office Open XML (OOXML), noting--among other issues--that the specifications do not take into consideration non-Windows platforms.
Junge is not the only OOXML critic. There have been collective ripples across the Web created by various lobbyists petitioning against OOXML, forming groups to speak out against the standard and supporting other formats, such as Open Document Format (ODF).
Most of the detractors have expressed concerns that the standard will only serve to strengthen Microsoft's hegemony over office productivity suites, with its Office offering already dominating the market. As Junge outlines in his blog post, OOXML's specifications contain Microsoft-specific legacy formats which can cause interoperability problems with other formats, underlining worries that it will lock users into Microsoft's products.
And because the standard is implicitly Microsoft-specific, it could render software packages incompliant with the General Public License (GPL), preventing the software from being shipped with Linux systems, Junge's blog stated.
Oliver Bell, Microsoft's regional technology officer for Asia-Pacific, noted in a phone interview that "ODF is not guaranteed to handle every Microsoft Office document because it isn't designed to [do that]. OOXML is."
Bell said the rise of OOXML was in response to customer requests, and offers users a wider range of document formats to choose from.
However, Harish Pillay, open source evangelist with Red Hat Asia-Pacific, told ZDNet Asia that a pitfall of OOXML is that the standard is not clearly-defined within its documentation, forcing users to go back to Microsoft for clarity.
"If an open source developer wants to implement OOXML, it is going to be rather tough without assistance from Microsoft," Pillay said.
Another issue that is fueling the ruckus is Microsoft's bid to gain ISO certification for OOXML, though one observer noted that this does not necessarily mean the standard will be more widely adopted if it is indeed ISO-certified.
"The ISO certification is a process to find problems and weed them out," said Rick Jeliffe, CTO of Topologi, who sat in on ZDNet Asia's phone interview with Microsoft. "Being ISO-compliant doesn't force people to use OOXML--it just ensures a higher quality standard." Australia-based Topologi makes XML-related desktop tools.
However, Junge told ZDNet Asia that users were likely to use OOXML--regardless of whether it is awarded an ISO certification--simply because it is bundled with Microsoft Office.
International encoding problems
Junge's blog post also raised the issue of language problems in OOXML, which does not support UTF-8 encoded Internet addresses, preventing the use of Chinese characters within a Web address.
When queried about this, Jeliffe noted that including a myriad of characters outside the 26 letters in the English alphabet would have complicated the format, as well as prevented it from being accepted by ISO standards.
He suggested that users should implement an ISO-certified mapping standard to allow characters to be electronically translated to another language. He added that the language encoding problem "will probably be fixed later, since Japan will bring up the same issue".
Red Hat's Pillay also offered his recommendation for a solution: "If Microsoft really wanted to [offer a format benefiting all users], they should just publish [a standard] with no strings attached at all [across] the entire specification, as [they did] with their [Word] Doc, [PowerPoint] PPT and [Excel] XLS file formats. Nothing can be simpler that that."
Junge added that the ODF should be considered as a viable alternative. "For the first time, after so many years, customers have the first real chance--in the form of the ODF--to say no to Microsoft, and reclaim freedom of choice on their desktops.
"The benefit will be more affordable prices for office productivity suites and real interoperability, as Microsoft will be forced to start the dialog with other vendors," he said.
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When I said that ISO would not accept non-ASCII characters, it was not concerning web addresses, but in response to a comment that Victoria Ho attributed to Mr Junge that Open XML was not appropriate for Chinese to vote for as a standard because it it did not use Chinese character element names. It was to do with the characters and names used in schemas in international standards.
I then mentioned the new ISO standard ISO DSRL which is designed to allow localized versions of standard schemas.
I have a blog about Native Language Markup and Open XML at www.oreillynet.com... which also has several thoughts on the issues that Mr Junge raises.
Posted by Rick Jelliffe on Saturday, August 11 2007 02:02 AM