NIST conditionally endorses Microsoft's Open XML in upcoming vote
Update: comments on NIST's voting as well as the other members of the INCITS committee are now public. This post has been expanded below.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is backing Microsoft's effort to certify Office Open XML as an international standard.
The U.S. standards body said on Friday that it has voted to conditionally approve Office Open XML (OOXML) pending some technical concerns in an upcoming standards approval vote.
NIST is part of the committee that will establish the United States' position in a September 3 vote at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Microsoft is seeking ISO standardization as a way to appeal to government customers concerned over long-term archiving of digital documents.
OpenDocument, or ODF, is another standard document format already approved by ISO. Advocates of ODF argue that a single standard is preferable while Microsoft executives argue that multiple standards provide more customer choice.
"NIST believes that ODF and OOXML can co-exist as international standards," NIST director William Jeffrey, said in a statement. "NIST fully supports technology-neutral solutions and will support the standard once our technical concerns are addressed."
NIST is a member of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) executive board, which will form the U.S. position in the upcoming ISO vote.
Additional text:
On Thursday, the comments of NIST and other members of the INCITS board were published. The ISO vote on Open XML is scheduled for September 2.
The voting record indicates that there were eight votes for Open XML, seven against and one abstention.
The NIST position is actually listed as No in the vote. In the comments, representatives from NIST explain that its position is to vote for conditional approval pending resolution of outstanding technical issues. According to the procedures, that conditional vote should be listed as a No vote, the NIST comment states.
A Microsoft representative on Friday said that the U.S. position in the ISO vote may not be known until September 2. A failure to pass that vote would prevent the "Fast Track" approval process at ISO.
In a statement, Microsoft's general manager of interoperability and standards Tom Robertson indicated that a final decision on ISO standardization for Open XML could take until early 2008.
"Regardless of the Fast Track vote outcome on September 2nd, any technical comments raised with votes on this open standard will be addressed through the ballot resolution process," Robertson said.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
Commander Spock must not be happy about that. He wants to knife the baby, because its father is Microsoft.
As for me, I could go either way on this one. We have several formats available to us today... open office, Adobe PDF, Microsoft Office (older versions), and we use the ones we like reguardless of what a committee says. And that's the way it should be.
PKWare used to control the zip standard, but eventually it got open sourced. Many other standards came out like rar, 7z, etc and from Unix we got tar, gz, bz, etc. I think there are some older ones like arc, zoo, pak, etc. The thing is most of them got started by corporations as proprietary standards and then got released as open standards.
Windows itself is a standard, but Microsoft made some of the API calls public, and there is work in the open source community to make open source standards that are Windows alternatives like WINE, and ReactOS which can run Windows programs, but are still under development.
Adobe is a company like Microsoft, and they released their PDF standard as opened and anyone can write their own PDF viewer and converter.
Lotus Smartsuite, Wordperfect Office, OpenOffice.Org, StarOffice, etc can all read the old MS-Office document formats. So they have become a bit of a standard.
Don't forget RTF, TXT, DBF, CSV, and other standards that have become open as well.
Now then why would Microsoft close the OOXML standard? It makes about as much sense as cutting their own throats, because Microsoft needs to have a way that Non-Microsoft systems can put data into a format that MS-Office and other software on Windows can read. It is like the United Kingdom changing how English works, so that only people in the United Kingdom can speak and write it, and nobody else on the planet can. English is a standard, a means to communicate with others. OOXML is a standard, a means to communicate with others.
Who cares who created the standard? As long as it can be used, as long as it is documented, as long as it is open, as long as people can write code to use it.
Either learn how to adapt to change, or die people. It is technological evolution here, those who don't adapt or refuse to adapt will end up extinct or near extinction.
Sure even a near extinct OS like OS/2 can have software written to process and convert OOXML files. Deciding not to do that, makes about as much sense as going back and living in caves and eating moss on the cave walls for the rest of your life.
http://ballot.itic.org/itic/archive.taf?function=detail&ballot_id=2212
The official voting results are here:
http://ballot.itic.org/itic/tallyvote.taf?function=vote&committee=INCITS&ballot_id=2212
The comment from NIST is here:
http://ballot.itic.org/itic/tallyvote.taf?function=detail&response_id=113254
and is very clear. The crux is that the rules of the INCITS vote state that a [quote] Conditional approval should be submitted as a DISAPPROVAL vote [unquote] (my emphasis added). Later in the text, NIST make it fully clear that: [quote] NIST would support a US National Body conditional approval vote (i.e., DISAPPROVE with comments) [unquote] (my emphasis added).
I find the official voting results and the official comment from NIST on Ballot 2212 of INCITS, to be in full contradiction with the title of the News.com newsarticle. A more accurate title would have been "NIST votes "NO" to INCITS Ballot on OOXML"
Peter Vandenabeele
- A Choice Among White Elephants
- by Len Bullard August 13, 2007 6:29 AM PDT
- I am of the opinion that two standards is fine particularly where one represents the document majority. The question of whether or not OOXML should be fast tracked comes down to what one considers "controversial" and since it is easy to create artificial controversy, technical merit is what is left. Now would be a good time to cut some requirements, not ladle them on in an attempt to slow a process or create controversy.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(7 Comments)That said, technically and with respect to emerging practice brought about by web 2.0 systems, this bitter butter battle is a choice among white elephants. Why we would have to debate the document formats of 15 years ago today is beyond me.