Standards... wot standards?
Back in November 2005 I blogged about the Open XML document format being submitted to Ecma and was raving about the likes of Jean Paoli (co-creator of XML) who have pushed this so hard. Well, the Ecma standardisation process did its business and we ended up with an international standard on December 7th 2006. So far so good... everyone likes standards, right?
The next step was to extend beyond Ecma and make sure the benefits of international standardisation were available for all... hence the submission to ISO. Here is where things started to go pear-shaped thanks to what appears to be corporate competitive engagement in the standards process.
Jean Paoli's open letter at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/choice.mspx gives more details, but the one-liner that sums it up for me is:
If successful, the campaign to block consideration of Open XML could create a dynamic where the first technology to the standards body, regardless of technical merit, gets to preclude other related ones from being considered.
I've always been a believer in standards in order to help drive interoperability and integration, and feel it is a huge shame that we could be heading for a world where the world's standardisation processes could result in a 'first past the post' situation. I want a considered, balanced process where appropriate standards can co-exist and even overlap to give customers an appropriately constrained yet productive choice.
With announcements like Novell's support of OpenXML and the ODF/Open XML translator I think we have an environment in which both specifications can interoperate and where users should be able to standardise on the one which meets their business needs best - which means they should ultimately both be ISO standards. As a long-standing member of the British Computer Society (BCS), I really hope our National bodies such as the BCS and the British Standards Institute (BSI) will take a strong customer-centric and customer-enabling view of this whole standardisation activity.
If you want more info on Open XML, check out http://openxmldeveloper.org and take a look here for more on ODF.
