Is this just a minor matter? I guess it depends on who you are. If I were the owner of the Open Office trademark I would not think it minor.

In any case you may want to update the Wikipedia page for OOXML for that. It currently calls it “Microsoft Office Open XML”.

My point was that Bob consistently puts “Microsoft” in front of the name. The standard is named “Ecma Office Open XML” and not “Microsoft Office Open XML.” It’s sort of like if somebody at MS were to consistently refer to “IBM ODF” as the name of the ODF standard.

Bob usually puts “Microsoft Office Open XML” in the subject, which seems likely to contribute to confusion about the actual name. (For example, that’s the case in 6 of the 7 examples I gave, and the other one has “MS Office Open XML” in a sub-head.) I understand Bob’s point, that in his opinion Ecma Office Open XML is strongly associated with Microsoft, but I think it would cause less confusion if he made that point explicitly rather than renaming the standard.

- Doug

… so shouldnt it be MicrosoftOfficeML? (MSOML)?
Google doesnt bring up anything substantial for us to be confused with.

yk.

“MSXML” would cause confusion. A quick search with Google shows that many developers use that name as the core libraries that Microsoft provide for manipulating and traversing XML streams. In fact, the “MSXML” returns a healthy 1,999,000 hits, suggesting it’s widely used by the technical community.

However, MSOXML returns just 88 hits, most of which seem to be people using it as a name for Microsoft Office XML anyway.

(A couple of the hits seem to be reproductions of code that I think Microsoft has put into web pages for round-trip editing of published HTML files from Office, but since it’s just 88 hits and not a declared public standard, I’d be willing to say this isn’t relevant.)

Therefore, MSOXML would be my first suggestion. One extra character makes all the difference… It stands, of course, for Microsoft Office XML. Why complicate things?

Indeed, as a bonus, it’s got a succinctness that eluded the specification itself… *grins*

(My second is TRIX-MS – it stands for “Tardy, Rushed, Incomplete XML Marketing Standard”. But I suspect that this will not be approved by the vendor who owns – sorry, donated – the standard.)

I think that there is an obvious name to be used : Microsoft XML, or MSXML in short.

This name avoid any confusion, and clearly depicts the true content of the standard.

Kind regards,
Luc Bollen

You wouldnt believe it, but Bill Gates also has this problem!

Please read this entry from molly.com:

http://www.molly.com/2006/12/14/who-questions-bill-gates-commitment-to-web-standards

Bill Gates said:
“We have our smartest people who go and work on that stuff . . . we just did the OpenOffice . . . our office XML formats we contributed to them . . . we’ve got XML at the core of all our products.”

Is it a bad name, or is it really really clever?

yk.

My point was how often it is misstated as “Open Office XML”, by users, by the press and by even Microsoft. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bob or I got it wrong once in a while. My argument is that this is a confusing name. But the examples you give seem to get the correct word ordering.

What am I missing here?

Here are some typical examples, most of which use that misleading phrase in the headline itself:

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1342

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1343

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1345

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1346

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1355

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1356

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1359

This makes it sort of hard to identify meaningful trends in the data you’re presenting. How many people have read the blog of IBM’s VP of Open Source and Standards during that time, believing they were reading the truth, and then unknowingly repeated the misnomer he has been feeding them?