The SoapVox

I just found a very interesting article by Stephen Walli at his Once More Unto the Breach blog, about Office Open XML Conformance (A Lesson in Claiming Standards Conformance). It’s interesting because it takes MS and Apple to the wall about what Standards Conformance actually is, related to OOXML…and he’s an ex-MSoftie :)

The whole thing starts with his buying iWork 2008 (the office-like suit for OSX) and reading about Pages ‘08 (the word-equivalent) having:

Pages ‘08 supports industry-standard formats, so you can easily open documents created in other word processing applications and share documents with others. Whether they’re using a Mac or a PC. Import your Microsoft Word documents into Pages ’08 with ease. Whether they’re Microsoft Office 2007 (Office Open XML) or earlier Word files, Pages will open them. Pages imports not only the text, but also the styles, tables, inline and floating objects, charts, footnotes, endnotes, bookmarks, hyperlinks, lists, sections, change tracking, and other elements of your original Word document.

So, he guesses that means he can actually open a .docx file and do stuff with it, right? Wrong.

The ECMA people decided to publish the OOXML standard in both PDF and docx…since it’s a standard, it should be accessible for anybody, right?

Well…when Stephen tried to open the ECMA-376 document on his Pages ‘08 “standards supporting” application, he got warnings and then realized that the document in docx didn’t look much like the PDF of the same document.

Figuring out it was probably a production problem (two different sources for the two different formats, for example), he asked a friend who has MSOffice 2007 to download the docx and the pdfs and compare them…and…it happens that opening the document on MSO2k7 renders it *exactly* like the PDF rendered for both Stephen and his friend.

Uhm…so…the standards support wasn’t, was it?

The thing is….standards support is a marketing term, and has nothing to do with standards conformance which is a whole different beast.

According to ECMA-376, for an application to be in conformance with the OOXML standard:

2.3 What this Standard Specifies
To address the issues listed above, this Standard constrains both syntax and semantics, but it is not intended to predefine application behavior. Therefore, it includes, among others, the following three types of information:

1. Schemas and an associated validation procedure for validating document syntax against those schemas. (The validation procedure includes un-zipping, locating files, processing the extensibility elements and attributes, and XML Schema validation.)
2. Additional syntax constraints in written form, wherever these constraints cannot feasibly be expressed in the schema language.
3. Descriptions of element semantics. The semantics of an element refers to its intended interpretation by a human being.

2.4 Document Conformance
Document conformance is purely syntactic; it involves only Items 1 and 2 in §2.3 above.

• A conforming document shall conform to the schema (Item 1) and any additional syntax constraints (Item 2).
• The document character set shall conform to the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646-1, with either the UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding form, as required by the XML 1.0 standard.
• Any XML element or attribute not explicitly included in this Standard shall use the extensibility mechanisms described by Parts 4 and 5 of this Standard.

2.5 Application Conformance
Application conformance is purely syntactic; it also involves only Items 1 and 2 in §2.3 above.

• A conforming consumer shall not reject any conforming documents of the document type (§4) expected by that application.
• A conforming producer shall be able to produce conforming documents.

So…Pages ‘08 isn’t an application in conformance with the standard, it just “supports” the standard…which actually means whatever Apple’s marketing department wants it to mean.

And what’s the problem with Pages not being in conformance with the standard? Well…Microsoft’s Tom Robertson (GM of Standards and Interoperatibility) says that ECMA-376 should become an ISO standard because there’s “support in products from Novell, Corel, Apple and others.”…if Pages is a taste of what the others are doing, I really don’t want to see what unofficial or partial support are like!

Stephen’s article has much more meat to it than this synopsis, and makes the case pretty clear…say no to OOXML if the only reason you are voting yes is because applications not-from-MS “support” it…it’s, at best, a hallucination of a fevered mind.

Tags: apple, ecma 376, ISO29500, iwork, microsoft, ooxml, Tech

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