Petition against OOXML

[Michael Kazin]

I think online petitions are overrated as a tool for grassroots
movement-  first and foremost, because they can't be trusted due to
the ease of astroturfing.  Microsoft could easily build a "petition"
and have millions of its "happy customers" "sign" it- a short macro
running on their WGA database would do the trick.

Secondly, I think they are pointless because you have no idea if
people bothered to do their homework.  In the pre-Internet days people
actually put their name to paper, and that meant so much more than
putting your email address in a textbox and pressing a button.  Not to
mention the fact that this type of petition will have thousands of
Linux fanboys sign it, without even looking for a good reason to do
so.

Not having much time, I've taken a brief look at the issue at hand
(see below), and decided that I'll both sign the petition (only after
giving it a good reading) and write a few letters as suggested.  I
haven't found a good place to start, but that's next on the list (I
figure getting others to write several letters is more important than
myself writing one).


My case:  (please feel free to ignore the rest if you have already
studied the OOXML issue or couldn't care less about me)

I've taken a quick look at the documents provided on ECMA, and was
completely overwhelmed.  It's over 6000 pages long, which is a
terrible thing for a standard due to the sheer difficulty of someone
trying to properly implement it.  A very fast scrolling didn't raise
any flags, but I didn't expect anything to just pop out at me.

Then I searched for some actual reasons not to go with OOXML.  Two
pages I found of interest were on GrokDoc and Wikipedia (though I
don't consider Wikipedia as a secondary source):
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDocument_and_Office_Open_XML_formats

I took a look at two issues that struck me as strange- the year 1900
date system and the numerous references to Microsoft's Office suite.
Both have no reason to appear in a document.  First, the year 1900 is
an old problem said to date back to Lotus 1-2-3, where the year 1900
was incorrectly implemented as a leap year.  Microsoft saved the bug,
implementing Excel to treat dates prior to than as invalid.  And
stating the obvious- other than providing for historic context, the
words "Microsoft", "Office", "Word", "Excel" and the like should not
appear in a standards document- they don't belong.  But they do, over
and over.  In attribute names, in technical decisions and glaringly in
the stated objective of OOXML in the Introduction section ("The goal
is to ..., all in a way that is fully compatible with the large
existing investments in Microsoft Office documents.").  I can
understand that there's a need for a converter to be built, but we
already have plenty of Word-to-HTML and Word-to-PDF converters.  A
standard is about creating a common way to implement something.  OOXML
is not- it's a way of trying to hold on to a terrible implementation
already in place- that of Microsoft's existing office documents.

That's my two cents.  Find your own problems with OOXML and provide
officials with your own viewpoint on the matter.  A petition only
truly reflects one person, no matter how many people jump on the
bandwagon- they just "me too-ed" and didn't care enough to show that
they took it personally.

Michael


On 7/8/07, Tech Writer <TechWtr at handspun.com> wrote:
> This web page also contains the note:
>
> IT IS URGENT THAT YOU CONTACT YOUR STANDARDISATION BODY IN YOUR COUNTRY AND
> EXPLAIN THEM WHY OOXML IS BROKEN; SENDING A NICE LETTER TO YOUR
> STANDARDISATION BODY IN YOUR COUNTRY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SIGNING THE
> PETITION
>
> Is this really useful?  If so, does anyone have a name and address that a
> letter could be sent to?
>
> Peg