OOXML document format WILL NOT be fast tracked!

Microsoft has failed in its attempt to have its Office Open XML document format fast-tracked.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136711-c,techindustrytrends/article.html

Microsoft stumbles in Open XML standards vote

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9770507-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

ISO: http://www.iso.org/iso/newsandmedia/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070

Good!

Now the real lobbying begins.

Italy: Milan and Rome

Milan - fashion capital of the world. I got to see an alligator skin handbag (handapaga for some people :) ) from Dolce and Gabbana, for 36 500 euros (yes even KSHS would be rather pricey)

Rome - lots of history here. The Pantheon, the Colosseum and the St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City - I wonder how the Swiss guard at the Vatican manage to survive in summer with their rather heavy and elaborate costume.
I thought Kenya had bad driving. Italians have this craze for speed; taking a ride on a taxi can be a scary/thrilling experience especially if the road is somewhat clear. Powerful motorbikes and scooters that seem to be turbo charged seem the order of the day. Not many people ride bikes like in other cities in Europe.

The pizza is great :) after all this is the home of pizza. And the ice cream is top notch. (especially from Blue Ice)

Sweden declares its vote on OOXML invalid

SIS, the standards body in Sweden, has declared its vote on OOXML invalid. There is no time to start over, so Sweden will abstain.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070830155109351

Kenya ought to follow suit.

OOXML is defective by design

I haven't tried this yet:

The entire article can be found here

Self exploding spreadsheets.

To reproduce the scenario :

• start Excel 2007 and create a new spreadsheet
• insert a value 10 in a cell
• insert a value 20 next to it
• select the two cells and click on the "sum" button to create a sum of the two cells
• save the spreadsheet (xlsx file)
• close it and unzip it

The corresponding XML in the main part is :

 
  10
 
 
  20
 
 
  SUM(C2:D2)
  30
 

Pretty simple XML. Now say we want to edit cell E2 and set a constant value of 40 in place of a formula. But instead of doing that with Excel 2007 interactively, we are going to do it manually :

• unzip the file
• grab a zip part known as xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml
• make the edit described below
• put the updated zip part back in the zip package
• zip it

The corresponding valid (and carefully changed) XML for setting the constant value of 40 in cell E2 is :

 
  10
 
 
  20
 
 
  40
 

Now open the file in Excel 2007.

The entire article can be found here

OOXML Continued

Brazil and India vote NO.

There's an article here:

Quote from the article:
"I was a member of the technical group that have studied OOXML specification extensively. I learned that it is unbelievable how ECMA (same guys that put together the JavaScript standard!) can think that a wannabe spec like OOXML is ready for submission. It is incomplete (does not provide mappings with legacy standards, since compatibility is OOXML goal), too long (6000+ pages), fully tied to a single product, uses deprecated substandards, promotes bad practices (embedded binary objects), has clear proprietary hooks (like “formatAsWord95″ XML tags), reinvents the wheel all around (date and color formats etc), and most of all does not have a standards-grade look and feel required for a universal and (virtually) eternal document format (doesn’t have to be perfect, but can’t be that imperfect)."

I guess these are enough reasons to say NO to OOXML ....

US votes yes (with comments). Germany voted YES

My favourite comment:

I would say that in the voting “yes” countries the ballot has been rigged by the votes Microsoft has bought by stuffing the voting committees with Microsoft partners. This has been observed and well reported.

and

In Brazil and in all other countries that followed a process, a NO is inevitable because of the quality of the OOXML specification, and the technical issues you can extract from it.

This week should have more country results out with the final result being announced in early September.