NoOOXML

I would much prefer to see Dr. Empain contact ISO directly. Or even indirectly via Rob Weir or FFII, but in person via e-mail, rather than in an anonymous post in a forum. First hand information is always a lot better in these matters, as it cannot be discredited as easily.

Hello Stephan,

I did it, and by the way I created my ID on wikidot to avoid the 'anonymous' stamp

Alain

Wikidot is not perfect. Often you post accidentally as anonymous.

You cannot use Konqui, Safari seems to be the same problem.

So, was voting for 26300 inaccurate? There were some "yes with technical comments"? Are there experts still unhappy with technical objections ignored by ODF team?
Vlad Shershulsky

If you actually look at the comments submitted with those "yes with technical comments" for ISO 26300, you will see that they were indeed minor and not conditional for the approval of the standard. For DIS 29500, there have been several instances of "yes" votes with a large number of quite fundamental objections. This is highly irregular, there is no question about that.

In case you didn't know, ISO 26300 was passed with only "yes" votes. No serious objections at all were raised. Sure, flaws and mistakes have been found, and the standard keeps evolving to address that, but ISO 26300 was well reviewed and well prepared. DIS 29500 was not.

Many people are currently unhappy with details in ODF, and many people will continue to be unhappy with it and suggest improvements and extensions. ODF is in active use by lots of implementations, so it's in constant development. It's supposed to be under scrutiny all the time and keep developing to meet new requirements. There is nothing final about the current version 1.1 of the ODF standard, version 1.2 is already being developed, but even the first version 1.0 was an honest attempt at doing it right. Have you looked at ISO 26300? It is really a very different read from DIS 29500. The considerable time and effort spent in writing ISO 26300 is in clear and obvious contrast to the shoddy rush job with DIS 29500.

Please look here:
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0728.pdf

You're right about the comments having been submitted as part of an 'approve' vote. But you can hardly call these minor issues:

- ISO/IEC DIS 26300 document does not include requirements necessary for Arabic language users. To be useful to the Arabic user, the standard needs to take into consideration requirements necessary for Arabic language formatting styles and presentation…

- The text does not conform to Annex H of the ISO Directives defining acceptable verbal forms for the expression of provisions (i.e. the use of "shall", "should", etc.). It uses the conventions of IETF RFC 2119 instead. Our understanding is that the PAS procedure does not allow exemption from this requirement.

- Some standards that are cited normatively, e.g. RELAX NG, are citing a standard other than the ISO standard.

- It is suspected that no satisfactory normative reference exists for the ZIP compression format, unless it be a reference to the specification of the Java JAR format. The alternative is that the format should be fully specified.

- The ODF schema contains a number of features whose use appears to relate to specific implementation choices or be constrained by a specific implementation restrictions. Examples include features that are application-specific or which would only be available on specific operating platforms (such as DDE, OLE).
[ You've got to love that comment on the ODF specification :-) ]

- Add the features of accessibility, if possible.

So an 'approve with comments' is absolutely a valid vote even with complex/important/hard comments. Unless you want to suggest that ODF's approval as an ISO standard was done by following an improper procedure…

Those are some of the more serious concerns submitted, I can agree to that. However, I can certainly call those comments "minor issues" because of the intent with which they were submitted. To my knowledge, none of the "yes with comments" voters were expecting their comments to ISO 26300 (then DIS 26300) to be addressed before the standard was approved. By being either sloppy or devious in your choice of words, you are deliberately trying to lump together "complex/important comments" and "hard comments", i.e. you are not making the very important distinction between "suggestions for improvement" and "conditions for approval". Please stop confusing the subject, it is confusing enough as it is.

You should also note that many of the comments to ISO 26300 were editorial in nature, and that most of those were fixed in the final version. Editorial comments are supposed to work like that. What technical comments there were mostly stated something to the effect of "please fix this if possible, if not take it under consideration for the next version of the standard". ODF 1.1 later added the requested accessibility features, for example.

The number of comments to ISO 26300 was relatively small. The number of comments to DIS 29500 is huge. There is a lot of controversy on the subject, as some countries voted "yes" without any comments at all, indicating that they have no problems at all with the current document, some voted "yes" with rather a lot of technical comments, some voted "no" with a large number of comments, sometimes even fundamental objections, and many others had to abstain for lack of consensus. This is definitely reason for concern.

Furthermore, nobody ever suggested that there was any hint of irregularities behind the decisions and the vote for ISO 26300. If you want to point to any such irregularities, feel free to do so, but I doubt that you will find any accusations of ballot stuffing, misinformation, mud-slinging or strange applications of procedure in there. The dirty process is a fundamental reason why DIS 29500 is under suspicion, and it is a fundamental reason for you to drop the argument that ISO 26300 also had its problems. Of course it had its problems, I fully expect that no standards are ever passed entirely without flaws, but DIS 29500 is so much worse that it is simply pointless to try to make any useful comparisons to anything else known in standards history.

DIS 29500 is an extreme, abnormal case. No previous cases exist that compare even remotely to this one. Stop pretending that "ODF is just as bad" and "this is normal". Both of those statements are obviously false. Are you really not seeing the clear difference between the processes behind DIS 29500 and ISO 26300, or are you just trying to spread misinformation?