Rick Jelliffe debunks some popular myths ...
ZDNet Asia has an article, "Open standards advocate comes out in favor of Microsoft", reporting Rick Jelliffe's comments when he was there recently.
"There's been an awful lot of controversy over Open XML becoming an ISO standard, claims that Open XML was developed to stop ODF, that open XML is not an open standard, that the ISO process is too fast to allow adequate review, that open XML contradicts other ISO standards and that ISO officials have been bribed and pressurized. I have never seen a technology with so many strong claims which are so misleading," he said.
Jelliffe ran through those accusations one by one.
On whether Open XML was started to stop ODF, he pointed out that Microsoft had started work on developing an XML data format back in Office 2000, work that predates some of the ODF work.
On the accusation that ECMA is a second rate organization, Jelliffe said that it was a different kind of organization than W3C and Oasis, aimed at standardizing contributed technology. It is not a standards invention organization.
This is not different from ODF, the first version of which is based on Sun's Star Office. He says that the initial version of any standard is always developed from a contributed standard.
Some have suggested the Open XML standard, at 6,000 pages, is too long and impossible to properly read and review. However, Jelliffe said that it grew to that size because during the review process at ECMA, non-Microsoft people demanded more complete documentation and thus it grew to that length because of its openness.
He said that accusations that Open XML contradicts other ISO standards can be explained and are not significant. One case is that Open XML stores dates as numbers, as has been the case in Microsoft Office all along. The other is how drawing routines use a grid format.
He also made some interesting comments about size, and dependencies on non-ISO standards.
"ODF 1.10 has 760 pages. However, it refers to a lot of standards such as SVG, MathML, Open Formula, xlink, zip. These are not ISO standards, these are from the W3C. Once you add them, they are quite comparable in size," he said.