Final ISO specification leaked!

Re: Final ISO specification leaked!

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:46:41 +0000

Once the document is out, a complain to the antitrust authorities in different countries could be made.

Re: Final ISO specification leaked!

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 03:25:57 +0000

Page ix

The goal is to enable the implementation of the Office Open XML formats by the widest set of tools and
platforms, fostering interoperability across office productivity applications and line-of-business systems, as well
as to support and strengthen document archival and preservation, all in a way that is fully compatible with the
existing corpus of Microsoft Office documents.

This could be a formal problem that renders the standard unapplicable. Then a reference to the ECMA members:

The following organizations have participated in the creation of ISO/IEC 29500 and their contributions are
gratefully acknowledged:
Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and
the United States Library of Congress

This should not be in the document.

Re: Final ISO specification leaked!

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:49:58 +0000

they also published some extras:

Update (03/10/2008): we’ve just added 1081c, 1082c, and 1083c
http://boycottnovell.com/forms/ooxml/1081c/1081c.htm
http://boycottnovell.com/forms/ooxml/1082c/1082c.htm
http://boycottnovell.com/forms/ooxml/1083c/1083c.htm

Final ISO specification leaked!

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:29:18 +0000

BoycottNovell has published a copy of the final OOXML specification! It seems that ISO does not want the public to review the broken specification before it is released. One country should just continue to appeal, and submit another complain, using the date of distribution of the specification inside ISO SC34 as the basis for a 2 months appeal. Appeals are not finished, you will see.

Meanwhile, you could start to check if the approved comments are well integrated in the "specification":

The specification contains 'legacy' parts to be compliant with the existing bugs of one vendor:

For legacy reasons, an implementation using the 1900 backward compatibility date base system shall treat 1900 as though it was a leap year. [Note: That is, serial value 59 corresponds to February 28, and serial value 61 corresponds to March 1, the next day, allowing the (non-existent) date February 29 to have the serial value 60. end note] A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29, 1900, has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1, 1900.

Don't write standards for one vendor!