OOXML, Wikipedia, and whitewashing

Image via CrunchBase

I'm still pissed about OOXML, and the standardisation process.

Have a read of the wikipedia article.

That certainly doesn't sound like my understanding of it - there's about 3 lines of content throughout the entire thing talking about the criticism of it, and the standards process.

What the?
You would thinks that at least the technical arguments against OOXML would fit somewhere on the main page, wouldn't you.

So, delving deeper; we discover this is mainly due to one editor with a hard on for OOXML.

His about page doesn't tell you much, except:

"From that work I have various interest in interapplication communication, real time and batch textual data interfaces, electronic archiving, datawarehousing and flexible data in documents (of which we produce millions every year)."

If you look at his edits, it's all very pro-microsoft, ever since he joined the site.

Now that's not a bad thing by itself - after all, it might just be his area of expertise; but to have a minuscule amount of criticism over a file format which created street protests during the standardisation process; primarily due to his efforts - that's just not on.

DIS 29500 / Office Open XML vs Standards Australia

Read this fact sheet, and this technical case against ooxml, then read this guy, affiliated with microsoft, and this piece on groklaw.

Then, if you've still not had enough, read about Sweden.

What a shambles.

As someone who implements OpenOffice in our document generation and workflow of a largish application, it's been a joy to work with ODF. It's simple enough to understand, and the spec is clearly laid out. I haven't read the whole thing, but I don't need to: I can easily find the information I want with only a little bit of googling.

As someone who is fighting with half of his office using Office 2007, and sending incompatible documents all over the place, I now believe that September 2 is doomsday.

How exactly am I meant to deal with 6000 pages of information hiding possibly contradictory information, if I want to implement something based on ooxml?
If Microsoft themselves can't even implement it in Office 2007 (I believe its a subset of the spec they use), what chance do I have?


Worse; I can't believe the shills who call this "Open XML" - it's Office Open XML, and deliberately named in such a way to create confusion.