Open XML stumbles in India
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(InfoWorld) - A technical committee in India unanimously rejected Microsoft's Office Open XML file format as a standard, ahead of aÂ vote on Sept. 2 by the ISO on whether to approve Open XML as an international standard. However, the rejection may be temporary should Microsoft meet some of the objections to Open XML raised by committee members. The technical committee was set up by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), India's national standards body, which is a founder member of International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and represents India at the international standards organization. "There were a large number of technical objections raised about Open XML, and many of which Microsoft was not able to address at this point," said D.B. Phatak, professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai. One of the objections was that Open XML was not fully compatible with OpenDocument Format (ODF), a rival existing ISO standard, he added. IIT Mumbai is a member of the technical committee. The decision not to back Open XML as a standard was taken after a late evening meeting of the technical committee on Thursday in Delhi. Microsoft and Indian outsourcer Infosys Technologies were in favor of the committee voting "yes" but with qualifying comments, according to informed sources. That option wasn't available for voters. Open XML will be again reconsidered for a standard by the technical committee and BIS after Microsoft makes the required changes to the document format, Phatak said. Microsoft said in a statement that it respected the decision taken by the BIS, but it was important to note that all the BIS members unanimously supportÂ  the need for multiple standards. The company will work with the BIS and the committee members on the comments noted during the ballot resolution process, the statement added. Â
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Some are questioning the fit between the two companies from the perspective of open-source tools and APIs.
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Microsoft's purpose for suggesting its Office Open XML suite of formats become adopted as an international standard is not so it can leverage its seal of approval in sales. Its purpose is to enable the company to be perceived worldwide as cooperating with businesses and with nations in the drive for interoperability, especially for the benefit of the European Commission which maintains that Microsoft is an unfair competitor.
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Opponents of Microsoft's new Open XML file format is complicated and untranslatable; existing ODF standard is enough.
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(InfoWorld) - Google, which has been less vocal than some on the furor surrounding the standards process for Microsoft's Office Open XML, came out Friday in support ofÂ the ISO's decision to reject the specification. In a post on its internal Google Code blog, Open Source Programs Manager Zaheda Bhorat said that the company agreed with the decision of the International Organization for Standardization not to approve the fast track of OOXML and listed some of the problems company engineers have with the format. The ISO voted earlier this month to reject an attempt by Microsoft to use another standards body, Ecma International, to fast track its XML-based file format OOXML through the process to become an international standard. The process was riddled with complaints that Microsoft placed people sympathetic to its cause in key voting positions toward the end of the process in an attempt to swing the vote in its favor. The company's decision to submit OOXML to Ecma and then the ISO has been controversialÂ as ODF (Open Document Format), which many rivals support, already is an ISO standard for XML-based documents. In fact, one of the problems Bhorat cited for why Google disapproves of OOXML is that it is incompatible with ODF. Other reasons Google supports the ISO decision are that the company believes there was not enough time to review the specification; there are undocumented features of OOXML that prevent implementation by other vendors; and dependencies on Microsoft proprietary formats and technical defects makes OOXML difficult to fully implement, according to the blog post. "Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit," Bhorat wrote on the blog. "Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure." Bhorat also used the post to stump for ODF, which Google supports in its Web-based office applications. IBM, Sun, and other Microsoft rivals also are vocal supporters of ODF. "With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses, and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others, and pass onto future generations," Bhorat wrote. Issues raised by Google and technical experts about OOXML during the voting process are set to be resolved at an ISO ballot resolution meeting been scheduled for Feb. 25-29, 2008.
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A look at the movement to convert Indian's voter lists to Unicode.
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OK, we had an extended breather from our last look at BIND's zone file pri.example.org. It's time to finish up and get a sense of what these records mean. To go off-topic a little, recently, I had the task of setting up two OpenLDAP servers and putting together a test environment for a project with several developers and several applications including some LAMP applications. Without a working knowledge of DNS, the project would have gone amuck.
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Microsoft Corp. has won approval for its Offfice Open XML document format from international standards body ECMA International.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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An Indian Institute of Technology professor--and open-source evangelist--discusses the role of Linux and open source in India. By Larry Greenemeier.
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IBM has taken the lead in lobbying against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML format. But it does support the format in a few products -- a fact that some Microsoft bloggers were happy to point out.
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(InfoWorld) - You might think the steady defeat of bills in several U.S. states to mandate the use of free interoperable file formats might dampen the spirits of IBM, one of the prime supporters ofÂ ODF (OpenDocument Format). Far from it, said IBM's Bob Sutor, who sees the recent news as par for the course in the evolution of any open standard. Last week, California became the latest U.S. state to stall or shelve proposed legislation to require its agencies to adopt open file formats like ODF instead of Microsoft's proprietary Office formats. Similar bills in Connecticut, Florida, Texas, and Oregon have met with the same fate, while Minnesota only passed legislation after it was changed from a mandate to use an open format to a call for the state's IT department to investigate the issue. Massachusetts, the first and so far only, U.S. state with a policy on using open formats, shifted that position somewhat last year to order the adoption of plug-ins to enable Office users to create and save files in ODF. In an interview earlier this week, Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM, talked about ODF and Microsoft's rival Office Open XML document standard. IDGNS: What's your take on the defeat of legislation in several U.S. statesÂ that would've mandated the use of open document formats? Is it a setback for the adoption of ODF? Sutor: We've seen this before around open standards. Take the Web itself. It went mainstream in about 1994 to 1995. If you trace it back, the Web was starting in the late 1980s. It takes most technology standards between 5 to 10 years to become established. They start in committees, come into their own, and then commercial interests come in. Web services kicked off in 2000, and we saw SOAÂ in 2004 to 2005. Now, no one doubts that SOA is big business. In the same way, if you look back at ODF, you can go back to 2003 or 2005. It's still very, very early. We wouldn't have thought it possible in 2005 that in 2007 there would even be any legislative considering of ODF. It's great that people are even talking about this in the first place. It's extremely early. Legislative committee talks take time. One year, a member proposes something, they meet that year on it, and the next meeting isn't until the next year. In some states like Texas they only meet every other year. I certainly expect the legislation to come back with a vengeance in the next sessions. Also, government IT policy makers aren't waiting for legislation, they're making active decisions. Changes are under way. Minnesota's bill will give a strong lead to other states. IDGNS: Where do you think ODF is at in terms of your prediction of five to 10 years for a standard to establish itself? Sutor: We're at about year three or four. IDGNS: It seems as though IBM and Microsoft are pitted against each other with ODF versus Microsoft's OpenXML. Sutor: The only one talking about a feud between Microsoft and IBM is Microsoft. On the ODF side, it's not just us, but we're a such a big company, we're going to say something. There's nothing whatsoever about ODF that particularly enables IBM. OpenOffice [an open-source office rival to Microsoft's Office] benefits; that's not our baby, we don't control it. We've put ourselves in a position where [with ODF] there are all the potential benefits of open source. It's interchangeability along with interoperability so if someone doesn't want to use someone's software, they can choose to use something else. I absolutely don't see this as a feud for Microsoft and IBM. We provide chips for the Xbox, we have a large, if not the biggest, services business around .Net. There's no feud. ODF is in the Oasis [standards body]. Microsoft is on the board of directors of Oasis and has steadfastly refused to participate in ODF. We're happy for them to join and would welcome them with open arms. IDGNS: Some potential users would like to see one single standard, a combination of ODF and OpenXML. Could that ever be a possibility? Sutor: It's more a difference in technology. Microsoft XML technology is simply not good XML. Look at the English language. It's a bunch of letters, words, and grammar, and you can use the rules to form sentences. That's similar to XML. You can sit down to write a novel, and so can I. I might write the worst novel, and you write the best. Just using XML doesn't guarantee quality in the same way that using English doesn't guarantee great novels. Microsoft's XML doesn't take into account modern design and steadfastly ignores other XML standards. I have a sneaking suspicion that OpenXML isn't the last format we'll hear from Microsoft. It's totally a personal thing, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a new XML from Microsoft in a few years and one with an architecture a lot like ODF. I could then see a natural convergence which could bring the two together.
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Those in the New York area might want to check out a new post Daniel Krook has concerning his talk he'll be giving on native XML databases at next week's New York PHP User Group meeting.   The presentation follows a mailing list thread and resulting blog post that generated a lot of interest and discussion on the topic. It should be a great talk for database administrators, application developers and content producers alike.   According to the summary of the talk, he'll be discussing what XML databases are good for and why you might choose them over a normal database. For more information on attending, check out the NYPHP User Group website.
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One thing Tantek  is good at pointing out is that for the most part RDF is a failure in the wild.  I don't think the problem is RDF itself or even that the RDF/XML serialization format is so difficult.  The major problem is that developers are lazy and most of them aren't as smart as RDF format creators and specification authors.  In a former life I was a member of the RSS 1.0 Working Group and once argued that RDF was inevitable .  The theory being that people are going to want to extend RSS and stretch it into new and complicated areas and that only RDF could accomplish this.  The problem is that the RDF/XML serialization format is beyond horrible.  As an olive branch I presented my though ...
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The votes are in, and Microsoft's Office OpenXML document format fails to achieve international standard status with the ISO. Microsoft's OOXML -- the native office-doc format for Office 2007 -- needed a two-thirds majority approval among the national bodies eligible to vote on the standard. Ballots came in at 53 percent yes, far short of the 67 percent required.
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NEW DELHI -- At least for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't so worldwide.
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net