transcyberia.info - openstandards

OOXML approved as an ISO standard

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:02:00 +0200

Several Dutch sources confirm (in english) that Microsoft's Office XML (OOXML) has been approved as an ISO standard.

Amidst new reports of voting irregularities, this makes ISO the worst april fools joke in history.

Microsoft has succeeded, not only in pushing through a non-standard, but in effectively destroying the credibility of ISO. This is a serious blow to the concept of standardization.

The amount of dirty play exhibited around the OOXML effort reveals the PR talk from Redmond about "interoperability" as nothing but a sham. To quote Glyn Moody:

If the whole sorry OOXML saga shows anything, it is Microsoft's deep and utter contempt for the whole idea of an open, collaborative process based on mutual respect and consensus. Henceforth, members of the open source community must view with deep cynicism all - not just some - offers by Microsoft to work more closely with the free software world. If they don't, they could find themselves used and abused just like the once famous, and now former, International Standards Organisation.

ODF support in Dutch government software

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:45:18 +0100

Centric, one of the few suppliers of software stacks for managing municipalities and other government outfits in the Netherlands, has announced support for ODF (and OOXML) throughout it's product suite.

The announcement follows after a row last year with the municipality of Heerenveen. After switching to OpenOffice, Heerenveen complained about the lack of interest by Centric in enabling ODF support for it's Doc4all application. Heerenveen let an external programmer write the required functionality.

GetronicsPinkRoccade, another major player in the Netherlands claims it has been supporting ODF for three years already. Searching for any references on it's site either through Google or using the local site search did not return any mention of ODF by GetronicsPinkRoccade though.

dataportability gains traction

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:59:33 +0100

With Microsoft joining DataPortability.org, an impressive line-up of major web2.0 sites is now co-operating on establishing common ground for exchanging social data.

This augments Google's launch of OpenSocial, a programming standard for social networking environments, last november.

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IE8: not quite standard

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:54:00 +0100

Microsoft has announced, that the upcoming release of Internet Explorer will render standard-compliant web pages in a non-standard way. Standard-compliant rendering requires a non-standard page tag. Huh?

welcome to the mirror palace!

If you get the feeling something's not quite right here, you're right. The reasoning behind this proposal was quickly shredded to pieces by the development community. You might as wel have a laugh

Continue reading "IE8: not quite standard"