Rob

Document Format Punditry

2007/01/23 By Rob 15 Comments

Rick Jelliffe, Mr. Schematron, who blogs for O’Reilly, recently announced that he had been contacted by Microsoft to see if he would be interested in a contract to edit the Office Open XML (OOXML) and Open Document Format (ODF) Wikipedia pages. As Rick says,

So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs.

I think I’ll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see. If anyone sees any examples of incorrect statements on Wikipedia or other similar forums in the next few weeks, please let me know: whether anti-OOXML or anti-ODF. In fact, I already had added some material to Wikipedia several months ago, so it is not something new, so I’ll spend a couple of days mythbusting and adding more information.

This immediately brought on an avalanche of commentary, on his blog, and elsewhere. As someone who also blogs on ODF/OOXML topics, I’d like to say a few words on the subject of document format punditry.

Few of my readers know me personally. They only know me via my words. Their acceptance or non-acceptance of this blog and what I say is largely determined by their perception of these two dimensions:

Authority — Am I an expert? Am I writing about things that I have direct knowledge of, or through education, training or direct experience would be expected to have worthwhile insights on?
Orientation — Do I have a bias on the subject being discussed. I’m not using the word “bias” in a pejorative sense, but to describe how far one’s views vary from a neutral, journalistic point of view, to a view that is overtly partisan on a particular issue. Bias is expected in opinion pieces, but not in Wikipedia articles.

My blog clearly comes with an expert, pro-ODF orientation. Additionally, I try to keep it light and humorous so even if a reader disagrees with me on one issue, at least they will be amused.

Looking at the range of people writing on these issues, I see the landscape something like this:

We have a number of highly informed experts in ODF and OOXML who aren’t really talking to each other.
We have the press, trying to be neutral, but having difficulty figuring out the significance of the technical issues since they are rather esoteric.
The General Public, who won’t even hear about the issues until the press figures it out.
And then we have various degrees of extremists of all varieties, not easily classifiable. Their writings are backed by ideological more than technical arguments. There are important ideological issues at stake in this debate, so these are voices are important.

What we seem to be lacking is the expert, neutral technical commentary. This is not too surprising. Many of the experts took sides a long time ago, or decided to sit this one out. That is understandable. But without this center of expert commentary, the press will continue to report the biases of whatever side they happen talk to first.

Where does Rick fit it into this chart? His expertise is undeniable. But if he takes Microsoft’s money he risks losing his reputation for neutrality. That is his choice and I am in no position to fault someone for that. He joins a crowded field of opinionated people already writing on this issue from one angle or another. He’ll likely be one of the better pro-OOXML writers out there. Nothing wrong with that. As Charles McCabe famously said, “Any clod can have the facts, having opinions is an art.”

But I do suggest that Microsoft’s money would have been better spent, and Rick’s skills better used, if they had engaged Rick earlier to help review and improve the OOXML specification. Trying to fix perceptions of the standard after the fact will be a lot harder, and more expensive, than creating a good standard in the first place.

And I will lament the fact that we continue to lack neutral experts who can digest the massive amounts of technical information out there and present it in a way that the press can reference and the public can understand. I think Rick would have served this role admirably. Instead we risk having one less voice in the middle.

Looking at this potential deal with Rick, and Microsoft’s earlier deal with Novell, I wonder if someone at Microsoft thinks that neutrality is dangerous and that their purposes are better served by eliminating it?

The Parable of the Solipsistic Standard

2007/01/22 By Rob 3 Comments

Winter is finally here. It is dark and dreary, the ground hard, unyielding. I’m getting over a cold. My feet are never as warm as I’d like them to be. But still, I look forward to spring. The seed catalogs have arrived. I’m starting to review possibilities for the garden next year. It is Winter, but this is only a temporary affliction. Current misery coupled with the knowledge of eventual satisfaction — there doesn’t seem to be a single English word which captures this thought. So, I’ll coin a word, “Sperandomiseria”.

Og mil ten fit ghust lech fer ti nostu, pertents? Sperandomiseria, cuic cuic danto do quant fer nos protoblian, sed nuic, volte torma. Zherantilli, fer muc opsice inito brandu s’deko prot affti? Nek worchi fer ubir! Sperandomiseria, gher-kloj ven ter moido, ven ter zer-moidi, eggen ven ter moidisti miki-moiki.

Do you agree? I think this is a good argument and I see no practical downside. Something must be done soon, lest we experience a repeat next time.

Sorry, What is that? You have no idea what I am talking about? Oh. So you don’t speak Weirish? We’ll need to do something about that then. That’s what I’m speaking now, Ecma Weirish. See, I used to use English, but I found that the English language was missing words for some things I wanted to express, so I made up some new words for these ideas, to ensure that everyone would perfectly understand what I was saying, with no ambiguities.

Ini hag danto do abergi nec palmu, ven fec tolibissi, pert rami fer cuic cuic affti.

Pardon, you are still having problems? You want to know about the words in the English language that were already well-known, useful and descriptive, and why I didn’t just use those, and supplement them with new words as needed? Good question. Once I started making up new words, I found that none of existing words in English perfectly matched my usage of them. In fact I really couldn’t translate my thoughts perfectly into any existing language. My thoughts are so unique that no other language works well for them . A totally new language is a much more accurate way to notate my thoughts. I wonder why everyone doesn’t do it? If you use this language, you will understand me perfectly.

Og mil ven ter moidisti… What? You again? Why can’t you just speak Weirish? When you use English you just slow down my mental processing. Ah, so you want to know how to speak Weirish. Great. I’ll give you a starter word list:

Pertentare (v) — to walk like Rob walks.
Protoblia (n) — a nice person [Note: This cannot be fully defined within this word list. It is best defined by how Weir thought a nice person was back 15 years ago.]
Zherantillo (n) — where Rob keeps his keys, sometimes upstairs near the bedroom, sometimes by the front door, sometimes in a hidden place.

Rhodantillu, muc muc dilinorpthu, ac…

I’m a patient man. What else do you want to know? Why should Weirish be an International Standard? Because it matches my thoughts so perfectly. Everyone wants to know what I think, so it is good that they learn Weirish for that task. If you look closely, you see that there are hundreds of languages already out there. I should have one too.

How do you say, “Firefox” in Weirish? Umm… uhhh… well, you don’t. I only use Internet Explorer, so there is no word for “Firefox”. Just say “Internet Explorer 4.0” instead. That’s close enough, right? Ditto for “Linux”, “OpenOffice”, “KOffice”, “WordPerfect” or “MySQL”. Here’s a 6,000 page document on Weirish I dictated in my sleep last week. Don’t leave! Hey! I’ve given you everything you’ve asked for. A perfect language, a dictionary for understanding it, a very very long manuscript on it, everything. Please, don’t go! Amitambo n’itorno!

Change log

1/28/07 — Fixed broken link, put Weirish text in italics, fixed grammatical error in one of the Weirish passages.

Opportunity Knocks

2007/01/21 By Rob Leave a Comment

There are a number of us commenting on issues related to open standards, in particular ODF. My blog roll has a list of several who regularly cover these topics. I’ve recently added a new link to that list, and I’d like to highlight it for you today.

Walt Hucks and Opportunity Knocks blog has been putting out some nicely researched commentary on the file format debate. His most recent post, “Whose Finances Are On the Line?”, looks at what Microsoft is risking if OOXML fails to gain acceptance.

Walt looks at the business angle in “What’s Wrong With Choice?”, delving into Microsoft’s financials and explaining how that is determining Microsoft’s behavior around OOXML:

Let’s be honest here. According to your latest Form 10-Q, Office is 90% of the revenue of Microsoft Business Division, which is in turn one of the three profitable segments in the company. Both of the other two segments related directly to the Windows operating systems (“Client” & “Server”). MBD is able to charge a pretty high price for its products. If there was a fully-level playing field—a standardized file format for the industry that almost anyone could implement—that would directly threaten Office & MBD. Losing dominance with Office would in turn threaten the Client segment, because users would be free to utilize whatever operating system(s) met their needs without being risking being unable to share office documents with others.

So, I’d like to officially welcome Walt to the Fraternity of Geeks who Blog about File Formats on the Weekend (FGBFFW), and recommend him to everyone else who will read his blog on Monday.

Amusing but Confusing

2007/01/20 By Rob 12 Comments

I’ve always been annoyed by Microsoft’s choice for a name in their “Office Open XML”. It isn’t the wishful use of the work “open” that bothered me. It was that the name just doesn’t roll off the tounge easily. It always seems to get stuck someplace and comes out wrong. You need to think harder to say “Office Open XML” and have it come out right.

“Open” is an adjective, and in English adjectives are usually placed before nouns, not in the middle of a noun phrase. We say, a “black guard dog”, not a “guard black dog”. When you fight language, language usually ends up winning. So it is not surprising that what comes out is “Open Office XML” by mistake.

I’m obviously not the only one with this problem. A quick Google for “Microsoft Open Office XML”, or “Ecma Open Office XML”, phrases that should get zero hits, reveals instead an embarrassment of riches. Everyone gets this wrong.

ZDNet’s David Berlind:

Yesterday, when Novell announced that one of the first fruits to be born out of its newly minted legal relationship with Microsoft would be a plug-in to OpenOffice.org that would allow the open source based office suite to open or save documents in Microsoft’s Open Office XML (OO-XML) file format, I had a tough time parsing through the text of the company’s press release.

Redmonks’s Stephen O’Grady with an article titled “Microsoft Open Office XML Formats / Open Document Format Follow Up”.

CRN: Reseller Channel News with a headline, “Ecma says Yeah to Microsoft Open Office XML“.

Computer Business Review:

Corel Corp, developer of the WordPerfect suite, announced last week that it will support both ODF and Microsoft’s Open Office XML format.

XMLMind, a tool designed to work with OOXML gets it wrong:

Thanks to new XMLmind FO Converter v4, it is now possible to convert XML documents to Open Office XML (.docx) the native format of MS-Word 2007.

BusinessWeek proof-readers missed this error:

…Microsoft is working hard to defeat it and promote its own XML-based file format–called Microsoft Open Office XML. This will be the default file format in Office 2007, due out late this year.

Even Microsoft Press Releases make this error:

‘Through the XXX Alliance, we are working closely with Microsoft to increase data access across our instrument systems and data analysis software tools using Ecma Open Office XML,’ said XXX, president of XXX.

Even Microsoft’s blog profile for a member of their own Corporate Standards Team, an OOXML expert, gets it wrong:

Dave is a member of Microsoft’s Corporate Standards policy team. He is involved with all of Microsoft’s global standards around server & tools which includes everything from XML to WS-*, from W3C to Oasis and ISO, all Office standards including Open Office XML, and all vertical industry standards from the enterprise markets to Microsoft Dynamics products

This guy works on Office Open XML and he doesn’t even get it right!?

Microsoft’s own OOXML overview page on the file formats can’t get it right:

By installing a simple update, users of Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office XP, and Office 2003 Editions can open, edit, and save documents in one of the Ecma Open Office XML File Formats.

Ditto for Microsoft’s FAQ page on the file formats:

The Ecma Open Office XML Formats will offer some key improvements over the binary file formats in use today within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Because these new file formats are compressed, the resulting document sizes will be much smaller, somewhere between 50 and 75 percent smaller in some cases.

A recent article by Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Manager in Australia got it wrong in the title: Streamlining your documents with Open Office XML.

And to top it all off, Bill Gates himself gets it wrong, then corrects himself, as seen in Molly Holzschlag’s transcript from a recent blogger outreach event she attended at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond:

But every year for 13, 14 years now we’ve not just followed and implemented standards, we’ve contributed. This WS stuff, . . . we contributed more Web standards than anyone! 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.

(Thanks to Yoon Kit from Open Malaysia, who has also been taking a closer look at the names used inside OOXML, for pointing out that quote.)

I’m not meaning to embarrass anyone with the above quotes. Those who have heard me speak on Office Open XML know that I struggle to get that name out every time, and do not always succeed. Like I said before, if you fight language, you will lose.

So the Ecma standard clearly has a name which causes confusion with the name of an existing application, “Open Office”, which happens to also be the most prominent implementation of OpenDocument Format, the ISO standard for office documents. OpenOffice.org is a registered trademark (check the Tess database for the actual registration) and has been used in the trade since 2001 for describing a application used for database management, spreadsheet, word processor and presentation graphics.

I am not a lawyer, but from reading a BitLaw writeup on trademark infringement, it appears that the thing to prove is “likelihood of confusion”, and the factors the courts would look at include evidence of actual confusion by consumers and similarity of the marketing channels for the two products.

In any case, to have an ISO standard that, by its aberrant use of the English language, almost compels users to transform it into “Open Office XML” will only confuse users. This is not just my prediction. It is my observation, backed up by many specific examples of how this confusion is happening even now. I invite you to comment on other examples you may know of.

Early last year, another Microsoft/Ecma was submitted to JTC1 for approval under Fast Track rules. It was Microsoft’s C++/CLI specification. During the 30-day contradiction review period national bodies raised objections based on the confusing name Microsoft picked for their standard, and the practical problems this caused. GrokLaw had good coverage of this.

A summary of the UK’s contradiction argument is:

In response to document ISO/IEC JTC1 N8037, the UK objects to Fast Track Ballot ECMA-372 1st Edition C++/CLI Language Specification, on the grounds that there is a contradiction with an existing JTC1 standard. ISO/IEC 14882:2003 is the standard for the C++ programming language. Adopting a second standard under the proposed name of C++/CLI will cause unnecessary and harmful confusion in the marketplace.

We consider that C++/CLI is a new language with idioms and usage distinct from C++. Confusion between C++ and C++/CLI is already occurring and is damaging to both vendors and consumers.

A new language needs a new name. We therefore request that Ecma withdraw this document from fast-track voting and if they must re-submit it, do so under a name which will not conflict with Standard C++.

Germany had similar objections:

We propose that the document is input into SC22 as a regular New Work Item Proposal and assigned to WG21 for further processing.

On a technical level, there are some rather different approaches between C++ and C++/CLI which can easily cause considerable confusion when both languages are considered to be “C++” or add unnecessary overhead when trying to write C++ code usable with C++ and C++/CLI.

I suggest a similar objection should be raised with regards to Ecma Office Open XML. It’s name causes confusion with an existing registered trademark. Ecma should rename their standard to something less likely to cause confusion.

Any suggestions for a new name?

Updated on 25 June 2007 to add some additional recent examples of this continuing confusion.

The Vast Blue-Wing Conspiracy

2007/01/20 By Rob 4 Comments

Microsoft’s Brian Jones and Doug Mahugh have put all the pieces together and are expressing their suspicions that all of the troubles OOXML is facing is caused by IBM.

Yikes, we’ve been found out!

The truth can now be told. We have a nine-floor complex beneath Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, Dick Cheney’s home state. We employee three-hundred Oompa Lumpas, ostensibly here on student visas, to read through the 6,000 page OOXML specification. They then input their concerns into a massively parallel computer, based on the old Deep Blue chess computer that beat Gary Kasparov. The computer takes the objections, formats them into English, inserting random literary quotes from The Modern Library of the World’s Best Books, and then posts them in blogs and press articles. The computer can express these objections in the form of sonnets, haikus, or even as crude limerick. Every year on January 14th (Thomas J. Watson’s Birthday) at 3:14am the Oompa Lumpas come to the surface, smear their bodies with blue paint, dance around a bonfire, howl at the moon and entreat the gods to vanquish their foes, mainly Microsoft, who canceled their favorite application, Microsoft Bob. Rob Weir doesn’t really exist. He is just a subroutine. As they say, “On the internet, nobody knows your are a subroutine processing data input by Oompa-Loompas working for IBM underground in Wyoming”

I guess that’s one theory.

But from what I’ve seen of the world, when you think everyone is out to get you, it is usually one of three things:

You are mentally ill
You are doing something stupid and people are trying to help you
You are in a movie

I’d suggest #2 is the more likely explanation. But a 4th possibility, one I had not thought of, is hinted at in the latest Dr. Dobbs, in an article by Michael Swain entitled “Microsoft Loves Linux: What’s With That?”. The article focuses on the recent Microsoft-Novell deal, but there is an interesting observation that applies to the format discussions as well:

Then there’s the PR angle. In Microsoft’s case, PR includes trying to look virtuous to the EU courts. Look, Microsoft can say, at how we play nice with competing platforms like Novell’s SUSE. Here’s a tin-foil-hat theory: Microsoft can’t compete against a movement, Ballmer has acknowledged. It can definitely compete against a company. So isn’t it likely that this question has come up at Microsoft: Can’t we somehow turn this Linux movement into a company that we can compete with?

Can the same be said about file formats? It is hard for Microsoft to beat a movement, so it attempts to turn this into a battle against a single company.

Let’s look at the facts:

ODF is not controlled or promoted by a single company. ODF is developed in OASIS with a Technical Committee (TC) that includes members from a number of vendors, including Adobe, Novell, Intel, Sun and IBM. The TC also includes unaffiliated individual members, representatives from various open source projects, as well as members from the OpenDocument Foundation and other non-profit organizations.

The Foundation in particular has brought a huge amount of talent and resources to the development of ODF. Traditionally, standards were developed exclusively by large corporations, and individuals and smaller players were marginalized. But the world is different today. The Foundation has shown that with a bit of organizational skill, individual volunteers can band together and have a voice and technical contribution on par with long-established corporations. They should be given much credit for this.

On the promotion side ODF is promoted by groups including the ODF Adoption TC, the Open Document Format Alliance, the OpenDocument Fellowship and the previously mentioned OpenDocument Foundation. The Adoption TC manages the ODF portal on XML.org and is currently working on various journal articles, whitepapers and responding to CfP’s for various conferences and symposia this year. I’ve lost count of how many companies are members of the ODF Alliance. I stopped counting when it went over 300. If you are not on their mailing list, then you should be. The Fellowship has also done amazing work promoting ODF and developer tools related to ODF.

So let’s put to bed the conspiracy theories that this is all just IBM out to get Microsoft. ODF is far more than one company. IBM does not own ODF or control ODF or control the groups that promote ODF. Those who say otherwise discredit the efforts of the many of volunteers who have worked so hard to develop the ODF standard and implement it in so many applications.