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Standardization within Ecma International

More than a year after being asked by the European Union to standardize their Office 2003 XML formats, Microsoft submitted the Office Open XML to the Ecma International standardization process to make it an open standard. Ecma formed a technical committee (TC45) in order to produce and maintain a "formal standard for office productivity applications that is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats, submitted by Microsoft". The technical committee is chaired by Microsoft and includes members from Apple, Canon, Intel, NextPage, Novell, Pioneer, Statoil ASA, Toshiba, The United States Library of Congress, The British Library and the Gnome Foundation..

Ecma International approved Office Open XML as an Ecma standard (Ecma-376) on 7 December 2006 and submitted the approved submission for fasttracking standardization to ISO/IEC JTC 1.

The Office Open XML File Formats standard, Ecma-376, can be freely downloaded from Ecma international.

Submission to ISO

As an ISO/IEC JTC 1 external Category A liaison, Ecma has submitted Ecma 376 to the JTC 1 fast track standardization process. To meet the requirements of this process, Ecma has submitted the documents "Explanatory report on Office Open XML Standard (Ecma-376) submitted to JTC 1 for fast-track" and "Licensing conditions that Microsoft offers for Office Open XML".

The fast track process consists of a contradictions phase, a ballot phase, and a ballot resolution phase.

During the contradictions phase, ISO/IEC members national standardization bodies submit perceived contradictions to JTC 1. During the ballot phase the members vote on the specification as it was submitted by Ecma and submit editorial and technical comments with their vote. In the ballot resolution phase the submitted comments are addressed and members invited to reconsider their vote.

Ballot result

ISO announced in September 2007 that the submitted draft of Office Open XML had not achieved the required number of votes for approval during the ballot phase. Eighty-seven ISO/IEC member countries responded to the ballot. There were 51 votes of "approval", 18 votes of "disapproval" and 18 abstentions. "P-members", who were required to vote, had to approve by 66.67% for the text to be approved. The P-members voted 17 in favor out of 32, below the required threshold for approval. Also, no more than 25% of the total member votes may be negative for the text to be approved, and this requirement was also not met since 26% of the total votes were negative. The standardization process then entered its ballot resolution phase, described below.

Response to the ballot

Ecma has produced a draft "Disposition of comments" that addresses the 1,027 distinct NB comments submitted in the letter ballot phase. The ISO/IEC members have 6 weeks to review this draft, and have an opportunity to participate in several informal conference call sessions with the Ecma TC to discuss it before the BRM.

Ballot resolution process

A Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) is an integral part of the ballot resolution phase. The outcome of, and period following, this meeting decides whether DIS 29500 succeeds or fails in its bid to become an International Standard. The DIS 29500 BRM took place in late February 2008.

Final outcome

At the BRM, 873 proposed changes to the specification were submitted by Ecma (of their 1,027 responses, 154 proposed no change). Of these only 20% were discussed and modified in meeting sessions, given the 5 day time limit of the meeting. The remaining 80% were not discussed and were subject to a voting mechanism approved by the meeting (see Resolution 37 of the meeting resolutions cited below). Using this voting mechanism NBs could approve, disapprove or abstain on each and every one of these proposed changes. This allowed a set of approved changes to be decided upon without discussion.

With the original submitted draft used as the base, all the agreed upon changes are applied by the Project Editor to create a new document incorporating the changes mandated by the BRM. In parallel with this, NBs have 30 days after the BRM in which to decide whether to amend their votes of 2 September 2007, and if at the end of this period the ISO voting criteria are met the new text is passed for publication as an ISO/IEC standard (JTC 1 Directives clause 13.9). The final revised text must be distributed no later than one month after the end of the meeting (JTC 1 Directives clause 13.12).

If successful, the text goes into the publication process which takes several months. It may take additional time for ISO/IEC to make the standard a free publication, if it becomes one.

Maintenance regime

The precise details of a maintenance regime for OOXML (should it become an ISO/IEC Standard) are yet to be determined. Ecma have however put forward a maintenance proposal.

Whatever maintenance regime is decided, the JTC 1 Directives stipulate that:

• Proposals to amend the text, and acceptance of any such amendments, are subject to normal ISO voting processes (JTC 1 Directives clause 15.5)
• The standard cannot be "stabilised" (i.e. no longer subject to periodic maintenance) except through approval in a JTC 1 ballot (JTC 1 Directives clause 15.6.2).
• For the standard to be stabilised it must have passed through one review cycle (JTC 1 Directives clause 15.6.1). In this review cycle the text would have to have been re-written to comply with ISO's formatting and verbal requirements (JTC 1 Directives clause 13.4).

Complaints about national bodies process

Complaints about the procedures in the national bodies have surfaced during the five-month ballot process.

• At Portugal's national bodies TC meeting, it was suggested that Sun Microsystems be represented, but Sun was denied a seat at the conference table.
• Eleven companies and Open Source advocacy groups made a request that Portugal's ministry of Economy and Innovation investigate the vote on OOXML.
• In Sweden, Microsoft Sweden asked its partners to get involved in the standardization process. 22 Microsoft partners (four of which were IBM partners as well) and Google each paid a 17.000 SEK fee to join the committee shortly before the decision on Office Open XML. Microsoft also notified SIS that an employee sent a memo to two of its partners, requesting them to join the SIS committee and vote in favor of OOXML in return for "marketing contributions." Microsoft stated that the memo was the action of an individual employee acting outside company policy, and the memo was retracted as soon as it was discovered. In the end, SIS decided to invalidate the vote as one company cast more than one vote, which is against SIS rules.
• In Switzerland, SNV registered a vote of "approval with comments," and there was some criticism about a "conflict of interest" regarding the chairman of the NK 149 committee, who did not allow discussion of licensing, economic and political arguments.
• Malaysia's vote is registered as "abstain," although its Industry Standards Committee on Information Technology, Telecommunication and Multimedia (ISC-G) voted overwhelmingly "No, with comments." The Chief Executive of Sirim had to interfere in the standardization process after, "There has been unprofessional conduct and a lack of ethical standards among some members of the technical committee," and more specifically, "some TC/G/4 members had taken to belittling other members who did not share their pro-ODF views, both during committee meetings and in personal blogs. These pro-ODF members were also attempting to short-circuit the normal consensus process for adopting a document standard."

Investigation of Microsoft By the European Commission

The European Commission has started an antitrust investigation into the interoperability of the Office Open XML format on the request of European Committee for Interoperable Systems, "a coalition of Microsoft's largest competitors." Anonymous source(s) of the Wall Street Journal claim that this investigation also includes an investigation into the ISO/SEC standardization process. The Financial Times reports that several national organizations in Europe have confirmed receipt of a letter by the European Commission. The letters ask for views on these charges and any supporting details of "alleged irregularities in several countries over the OOXML standardization proposal, and accusations of attempts to influence voting."

Microsoft complaints about competitors

In an open letter, Microsoft attacked IBM's opposition to the Office Open XML standardization process, saying

"On December 7th, Ecma approved the adoption of Open XML as an international open standard. The vote was nearly unanimous; of the 21 members, IBM’s was the sole dissenting vote. IBM again was the lone dissenter when Ecma also agreed to submit Open XML as a standard for ratification by ISO/IEC JTC1."

Nicos Tsilas, Microsoft's senior director of interoperability and intellectual property policy, expressed concern that IBM and the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the use of the rival OpenDocument format (ODF) to the exclusion of other formats. In his opinion, they are "using government intervention as a way to compete" as they "couldn't compete technically."

"IBM led a global campaign urging national bodies to... not even consider Open XML, because ODF had made it through ISO/IEC JTC1 first."

"IBM have asked governments to have an open-source, exclusive purchasing policy."

But another ZDNet story quotes Tsilas questioning why these accusations are coming forth. The slip of the tongue by Tsalis of open source instead of open standards. OOXML is not open source but open standards. "There are good arguments for and against mandating open source in government — protecting business models or profit streams should not be among them" and that OOXML is supposed to be an open standard like ODF, "How, then, can adopting the latter "harm Microsoft's profit stream"? And since when has an open standard been "a product"?"

Arguments in support and criticism of OOXML standard

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Support

Microsoft has argued for standardization on the Open XML community web site. The Microsoft arguments for OOXML include that it is designed to cover most kinds of document data, so that old documents can be converted to OOXML with little data loss; that the format is compact, since it is compressed; that it is easy to learn; and that it inherits a lot of benefits from XML, such as document data integration, Unicode, and easy integration of new formats.

To counter this argument, ODF Alliance India published an extensive technical report in 2007 containing concrete issues by members of the association, as well as replies from Microsoft. In December 2007 ECMA announced that many of reported issues will be taken into account in next edition of the standardisation proposal to ISO.

User base argument

The most widely used office productivity packages currently rely on various proprietary and reverse engineered binary file formats such as doc, ppt and xls. For users of the binary formats there could be an advantage to migrating to an open XML standard that maps the features of previous binary file formats. The Office Open XML standard explicitly states this as a goal, in order to preserve investments in existing files and applications.

Microsoft key benefits arguments

Microsoft makes the following claims about the benefits of Office Open XML as compared to the format currently used with Microsoft software: integration of business information with documents, open and royalty-free specification, compact and robust file format, safer documents, easier integration, transparency and improved information security, and compatibility.

Policy arguments

With regards to the alleged overlap in scope with the OpenDocument format, Ecma has provided the following policy arguments in favor of standardization: overlap in scope of ISO/IEC standards is common and can serve a practical purpose; OOXML addresses distinct user requirements; ODF and OOXML are structured to meet different user requirements; and OOXML and ODF can serve as duo-standards.

Technical arguments

• The use of the Open Packaging specification which allows for Indirection, Chunking and Relative indirection.
• Uses the ZIP format, making ZIP part of the standard. Due to compression, files are smaller than current binary formats.
• It supports custom data elements for integration of data specific to an application or an organisation that wants to use the format.
• It defines spreadsheet formulas.
• Office Open XML contains alternate representations for the XML schemas and extensibility mechanisms using RELAX NG (ISO/IEC 19757-2) and NVDL (ISO/IEC 19757-4.)
• No restriction on image, audio or video types, Book 1 §14.2.12.
• Embedded controls can be of any type, such as Java or ActiveX, Book 1 §15.2.8.
• WordprocessingML font specifications can include font metrics and PANOSE information to assist in finding a substitution font if the original is not available, Book 3 §2.10.5.
• In the situation where a consuming application might not be capable of interpreting what a producing application wrote, OOXML defines an Alternate Content Block which can represent said data in an alternate format, such as an image. Book 3 §2.18.4.
• Internationalization support. For example date representation: In WordprocessingML (Book 4 §2.18.7) and SpreadsheetML (Book 4 §3.18.5), calendar dates after 1900 CE can be written using Gregorian (three variants), Hebrew, Hijri, Japanese (Emperor Era), Korean (Tangun Era), Saka, Taiwanese, and Thai formats. Also, there are several internationalization related spreadsheet conversion functions.
• Custom XML schema extensibility allows the addition of features to the format. This can, for instance, facilitate conversion from other formats and future features that are not part of the official specification.
• The format has features that can be used to enhance performance. For instance, SpreadsheetML has an optional performance feature to track which cells have to be recalculated when spreadsheet data changes. In spreadsheet formats lacking this feature, all of the used cells in the entire spreadsheet must be verified at least once for recalculations of the spreadsheet.

Criticism

The standard has been the subject of debate within the software industry. Many of the participants in the approval process are generally supportive of eventual ISO standardization, but are unwilling to support the ISO fast track process until their issues are resolved. At over 6,000 pages in length and allegedly containing ambiguities, the specification is difficult to evaluate quickly. Objectors also complain that there could be user confusion regarding the two standards because of the similarity of the "Office Open XML" name to both "OpenDocument" and "OpenOffice".

Microsoft, whose products use the current version of Office Open XML, has not committed to use the specification for any length of time. According to a Techworld article, "to organisations that need a well-defined, XML-based format to manage huge numbers of documents that may be archived for decades, this is important. These customers want a standard that Microsoft will promise to use - even if it's not convenient for the company's plans."

Sources of criticism

Criticism originates from organizations and individuals including the free software and open source communities, FFII, OpenDocument supporters and technology companies that develop office software around the competing OpenDocument format, such as Sun Microsystems, Novell, and IBM. Office Open XML has been criticized by these organisations on technical and legal grounds. FFII, for example, launched a campaign against this standard.

In addition, the standardization process itself has been questioned, including claims of balloting irregularities by some technical committees, Microsoft representatives and Microsoft partners in trying to get Office Open XML approved.

Technical criticisms

• Reliance on application-defined behaviors to support important functionality that should be documented or supported via existing standards. Book 4 §6.1.2.19 defines the "equationxml" attribute of "shape" elements, "used to rehydrate an equation using the Office Open XML Math syntax"; however, the "actual format of the contents of this attribute are application-defined".. Ecma has proposed solving this issue by adding the missing syntax of this element to the specification.
• Use of DrawingML and the transitional use only VML instead of SVG, and use of Office Math ML instead of MathML. MathML and SVG are W3C recommendations. VML was rejected as a W3C standard in 1997.
• Inconsistent notations for percentage units. Book 4 §2.18.85 uses predefined symbols (like "pct15" for 15%) in 5 or 2.5 percent increments, §2.15.1.95 uses a decimal number giving the percentage, §2.18.97 uses a number in fiftieths of a percent, and §5.1.12.41 uses a number in thousandths of a percent.
• Inflexible numbering format. Book 4 §2.18.66 describes a numbering format that is fixed to a few countries and contradicts both the W3C XSLT recommendation and Unicode ISO 10646 standard.

See also

• Office Open XML

References

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5. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm
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