a 'mooh' point

Yesterday I was notified that the OpenXml SDK had been released as an Open Source Project by Microsoft.

Back in summer 2008 I attended a workshop in Redmond, WA regarding the future support of OOXML and ODF in Microsoft Office. I remember sitting down with one of the PMs at the time – talking to him about what a wonderful idea it would be to release the OpenXml SDK as OSS. I also remember how frustrating it was to be told – amidst between the lines - that “it ain’t gonna happen”.

Now – almost exactly 6 years later, they have finally listened (btw, I am in no way trying to take credit for “making” Microsoft OSS the OpenXml SDK – it was completely their decision to do it). But it does seem to confirm a trend in Microsoft – where the revenue cows (Office, Windows, and Servers etc.) are kept closed, but the tooling around them, the stuff that ties them all together – is with increasing frequency being released as open source.

The OpenXml SDK is released under the auspice of “MS Open Tech” – in other words; Doug Mahugh and friends. Eric White has been an integral part of making this happen. Kudos to all of them from here :-).

The source code is available on github and is free for everyone to look at and download. The license is Apache 2.0 . It will still remain to be seen if they request pull-requests, but I cannot imagine why they should not.

Now, I haven’t had the time to dig into the code in much detail yet, but I will do this in the following weeks. One thing I will look deeply into is the .Validate()-method of the toolkit. It validates the content of the OOXML-document being worked at – oh well, it should do, but if anyone has tried to run a document through e.g. my validator on http://29500.idippedut.dk or Alex Brown’s at https://code.google.com/p/officeotron/ will have found out, that the document – even with a “clean” result from .Validate() is not valid according to the schemas of OOXML. It turns out, that it does not validate against the spec – it validates against the supported functionality of Microsoft Office. Now, that is a completely valid (no pun intended) approach from the SDK, since most working with OOXML at the end of the say need interoperability with Microsoft Office.

But now with the SDK being released to a larger amount of developers, I guess it would be appropriate to expand or “fix” the validation-method. One possible improvement could be to allow validation against a range of XML schemas. Another would be to allow validation after haven processed the document applying MCE to the content. A Third improvement would be to write out dependency of WindowsBase.dll ( and thereby System.IO.Packaging) . I have a theory that the reason why OpenXml SDK is not available on Windows Phone is this exact dll, and it would be nice to be able to manipulate OOXML-documents in memery on WP.

We’ll see what will happen to it in the future – what would you like to have changed in the SDK?

The other day a document landed on my "desk" in the Danish Mirror committee to JTC1 SC34. It was the document ”EXPLANATORY REPORT - OASIS Submission of OpenDocument v1.2 to ISO/IEC JTC 1 [JTC1 N12033]”. In other words: ODF TC in OASIS has wished to elevate OASIS ODF 1.2 to an ISO-standard.

OASIS is a so-called "PAS Submitter" to ISO, which enables more or less direct elevation of existing standards to be an ISO-standard, but without any corresponding work on the standard itself in ISO. OASIS ODF TC has used this process for ODF 1.0 back in 2006.

So ODF will not be maintained in ISO - and agreement has been made that work itself developing and improving ODF will be exclusively done in OASIS ODF TC - with subsequent releases to ISO for approval ... what someone might refer to as "rubber-stamping".

For OOXML a different agreement was made during sumission/approval of OOXML - that being that work with OOXML takes place in ISO and this is where the standard is developed and improved. That being said, a substantial amount of work with OOXML takes place in ECMA and a large amount of our work in ISO originates from ECMA's TC45 - the group where OOXML was "born". ODF 1.2 was approved in OASIS in september 2011 (and publicized in early 2012), and now three years later it has landed on our desk in ISO.

I immediately wrote to Danish Standards and told them, that I suggest that Denmark votes "yes". Technically this is not a task for the mirror committee to SC34 since the vote is on JTC1-level, but the more I think about it, the more I doubt that I made the right suggestion to Danish Standards.

Because does it add any value for anybody to - three years after approval in OASIS - ask for an ISO approval? Is there any good reason to spend time on this in OASIS and in ISO? If the argument is that there are some (governmental) institutions that require an ISO-standard level to use it in their organisations/countries - what good is it to them to wait more than three years to submit it to ISO for approval?