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SC 34 meetings, Copenhagen

This week I attended 4 days of meetings of SC 34 working groups. WG 4 (OOXML maintenance) and WG 5 (OOXML/ODF interoperability). Last year I predicted that OOXML would get boring and, on the whole, the content of these meetings fulfilled that prophecy (while noting, of course, that for us markup geeks and standards wonks “boring” is actually rather exciting). There was however, one hot issue, which I’ll come to later …

Defects

Since the publication of OOXML in November last year, the work of WG 4 has been almost exclusively focussed on defect correction. To date over 200 defects have been submitted (the UK leading the way having submitted 38% of them). Anybody interested in what kinds of thing are being fixed can consult the material on the WG 4 web site for a quick overview. During the Copenhagen meeting WG 4 closed 53 issues meaning that 71% of all submitted defects submitted have now been resolved. By JTC 1 standards that is impressively rapid. The defects will now go forward to be approved by JTC 1 National Bodies before they can become official Amendments and Corrigenda to the base Standard. Among the many more minor fixes, a couple of agreed changes are noteworthy:

  • In response to a defect report from Switzerland, for the Strict version (only) of IS 29500, the XML Namespace has been changed, so that consumers can know unambiguously whether they are consuming a Strict or Transitional document without any risk of silent data loss. This is (editorially) a lot of work, but the results will be I think worthwhile.
  • As I wrote following the Prague meeting, there was a move afoot to re-instate the values “on” and “off” as permissible Boolean values (alongside “true”, “1”, “false” and “0”) so that Transitional documents would accurately reflect the existing corpus of Office documents, in accord with the stated scope of the standard. This change has now been agreed by the WG.

The ISO Date Issue

The “hot issue” I referred to earlier is ISO dates. What better way to illustrate the problem we face than by using one of Denmark’s most famous inventions, the LEGO® brick …


f*cked-up lego brick
OOXML Transitional imagined as a LEGO® brick

More precisely, the problem is about date representation in spreadsheet cells. One of the innovations of the BRM was to introduce ISO 8601 date representation into OOXML. However the details of how this have been done are problematic:

  1. Despite the text of the original resolution declaring that ISO 8601 dates should live alongside serial dates (for compatibility with older documents), one possible reading of the text today is that all spreadsheet cell dates have to be in ISO 8601 format
  2. Having any such dates in ISO 8601 format is particularly problematic for Transitional OOXML, which is meant to represent the existing corpus of office documents. Since none of these existing documents contain ISO 8601 dates having them here makes no sense
  3. Even more seriously, if people start creating “Transitional” OOXML documents which contain 8601 dates, then a huge installed base of software expecting Ecma-376 documents will silently corrupt that data and/or produce surprising results. (My concern here is more for things like big ERP and Financial systems, rather than desktop apps like MS Office). Hence the odd LEGO brick above: like those bricks, such files would embody an interoperability disaster
  4. Even the idea of using ISO 8601 is pretty daft unless it is profiled (currently it is not). ISO 8601 is a big complex standards with many options irrelevant to office documents: it would be far more sensible for OOXML to target a tiny subset of ISO 8601, such as that specified by W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 2: Datatypes
  5. Many date/time functions declared in spreadsheetML appear to be predicated on date/time values being represented as serial values and not ISO 8601 dates. It is not clear if the Standard as written makes any sense when ISO 8601 dates are used.

The solution?

Opinions vary about how the ISO date problem might best be solved. My own strong preference would be to see the Standard clarified so that users were sure that Transitional documents were guaranteed to correspond to the existing document reality – in other words that Transitional documents only contain serial date representations, and not “ISO 8601” date representations. In my view the ISO dates should be for use in the Strict variant of OOXML only.

If a major implementation (Excel 2010, say) appears which starts pumping incompatible, ISO 8601-flavoured Transitional documents into circulation, then that would be an interop disaster. The standards process would be rightly criticised for producing a dangerous format; users would be at risk of corrupted data; and guilty vendors too would be blamed accordingly.

It is imperative that this problem is fixed, and fixed soon.

Impressions of Copenhagen

Our meetings took place at the height of midsummer, and every day was glorious (all meetings started with a sad closing of the curtains). Something of a pall was cast over proceeding by thefts, in two separate incidents, of delegates’ laptop computers; but there is no doubt Copenhagen is a wondeful city blessed with excellent food, tasty beer, and an abundance of good-looking women. Dansk Standard provided most civilised meeting facilities, and entertainment chief Jesper Lund Stocholm worked hard to ensure everyone enjoyed Copenhagen to the full, especially the midsummer night witch-burning festivities! Next up is the SC 34 Plenary in Seattle in September; I’m sure there will be many more defect reports on OOXML to consider by then, and that WG 4's tireless convenor Murata-san will be keeping the pressure on to mantain the pace of fixes  …


Jesper Among the Beers
Jesper Lund Stocholm

SC 34 Meetings, Okinawa – Day 5 and Summary

Okinawan Entertainment
Singer Azusa Miyagi from the Okinawan pop duo Tink Tink

Day 5 found us all attending a joint session of the working groups to sort out more administrative details and share the recommendations made by WG 5. Anybody interested in seeing the state of play in WG 4’s work can consult the WG 4 web site, where progress on defect correction can be tracked.

Overall this has been I think a successful meeting: the two new working groups are up and running and their work is well underway. There was perhaps the occasional trace of residual angst overhanging from last year: NBs are keen to assert their sovereignty in the decision making process, and the Ecma delegates are keen to be assured the JTC 1 processes can deliver the mechanisms and timeliness needed to keep IS29500 in shape. In general however, there has been a decided “unclenching” as delegates warmed to the (let’s face it) sometime drudgery of maintaining XML document formats. This was all helped by the exceptional hospitality shown by JISC and ITSCJ in hosting the meetings, and in particular by the efforts of WG 4 convenor Murata Makoto. Whenever one wanted to know where to eat, what to drink, or where the prettiest singers could be found, Murata-san was your man!

It was great also to work with Jesper Lund Stocholm, who has also been covering these meetings on his blog. It would be better still if more countries followed Denmark, and more companies followed the shining example of CIBER, in supplying experts for assisting in this important work.

It was something of a shock coming from the 23°C sunshine of Okinawa to freezing snow-bound Britain. And also a shock to review the amount of standards work piling up to be done before the next SC 34 meetings in Prague: defects to be filed, maintenance agreements to be hammered out, agendas to write, ballots to vote on and proposals to draft. I am expecting the Prague meeting to be particularly vibrant, not least since it is preceded by XML Prague 2009. I have not been to an XML Prague before, but have heard only good things about it. Certainly, the programme looks fascinating (though I make no claims for my own presentation). It certainly seems that Prague is going to be the centre of the world for XML-heads everywhere in late March …

SC 34 Meetings, Okinawa - Day 1

The Ruins of Nakagusuku
The Ruins at Nakagusuku

Today (apart from visiting the Ruins of Nakagusuku Castle), was mostly given over to a discussion of JTC 1 Procedure. The JTC 1 Directives collectively make an ever-surprising document — just when you think you've got your head around some point, a new paragraph is discovered which calls it all into question. When combined with jet lag, this can be heavy work.

I have been following the tweets of some fellow SC 34 people as they make their ways from various corners of the globe to join the Okinawa meetings. I expect tomorrow will see the influx of even more standards wonks into the hotel. Already there is a certain amount of "geeking out" going on. Over the breakfast table the hot topic of discussion concerned marking-up pagination decisions in documents from systems which flowed footnotes over multiple pages. And at lunch there was much debate over whether editors should prefer using "shall" to "has to" in standards documents (consensus: non-native english speakers find "shall" easier to understand).

SC 34 Meetings, Okinawa - Day 0

Okinawan Bloom
It is nice to get away from the freezing drizzle of the UK,
to the milder climes and bright sunshine of Okinawa.

I am in Okinawa for a week of ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 34 meetings. To be precise, these are not meetings of SC 34 itself (there will be no plenary), rather the week will be taken up with two activities by parts of SC 34:

  • On Monday and Tuesday, a team picked by our Chairman will meet to discuss the maintenance procedures for ODF among themselves, and with OASIS representatives.
  • On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday SC 34’s two new working groups, WG 4 and WG 5, will meet.

These in turn will generate plenty of input for SC 34’s full Prague meeting in March.

ODF Maintenance

I have already written about the background to this activity, both the issues caused by the current lack of agreement on how maintenance should proceed, and JTC 1’s instruction to SC 34 from Nara that SC 34 and OASIS should develop a document specifying “detailed operation of joint maintenance procedures”.

At this stage the negotiations are completely informal, and expected simply to offer an opportunity for all parties to have an open discussion aimed at increasing the level of mutual understanding to a point where they are ready to start working together in earnest on drafting the agreement text. For SC 34, this text will need to be presented to members in time for consideration in Prague, at which meeting it will seek SC 34’s blessing to be passed up to JTC 1 for further consideration.

WG 4 & WG 5

Okinawa will see the first two meetings of our two new working groups, WG 4 (dedicated to maintenance of ISO/IEC 29500, aka OOXML), and WG 5 (dedicated to document file format interoperability). Both groups are expected to meet face-to-face more frequently than the rest of SC 34, and to make heavy use of the newfangled teleconferencing technology that JTC 1 has recently embraced.

WG4’s business in the short term will be largely taken up with correcting defects in the 29500 text (in JTC 1 parlance, producing corrigenda) in response to reported defects. A number of these have been submitted already, by Japan, the UK and Ecma themselves. The UK has a large number on additional ones brewing and is likely to submit a second batch in February.

WG 5’s short-term work is to concentrate on the Technical Report (a more informal document that an International Standard) being drafted which sets out some of the considerations when mapping between ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF 1.0) and ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML). I’m wondering too whether there will be any moves in this WG to garner support for new work in this area. Now that the dust has settled over document formats themselves, even non XML experts are beginning to grok that by themselves these standards don’t actually give us that much, but are a useful foundation on which to work. “Interoperability” in particular requires so much more than simply having standardised document formats. I await developments in this space with interested anticipation …

European Standards and Innovation Policy

I am writing this sitting on the Eurostar from Brussels to London, having just attended an event organised by the Centre for European Policy Studies to discuss “EU Innovation Policy and the Role of Standards”. It was an exciting chance to get to express a view to some of the movers and shaker in and around the European Commission, as well as to take some photos of Brussels and get some last-minute Christmas shopping done (chocolates!).


Brussels by Night #1
Brussels by Night — Église Sainte-Marie.

As the meeting was quite brief, I had decided in advance that any message I wanted to get across would need to attempt to be both honed and compact. I also thought it was likely that the issue of OOXML might be raised – so I was fully ready on that score too, even though I took care to avoid the “single issue politics” approach which seems to have characterised some of the debate on this topic. As it was, the topic was hardly raised and when it was I was glad to be able to put straight some misconceptions floating around about the difference between the PAS and Fast Track procedures.

Over the course of the meeting we heard from Renate Weissenhorn (DG Industry, Head of Standardization Unit) on the importance of standardisation for innovation in the EU, in a presentation which nicely set the scene for what followed. Knut Blind (Berlin University) had carried-out a deep study of some of the subtle interrelations (among other things) between standards and legislation. His presentation, like that of Anne Lehouck (DG Industry, ICT for Competitiveness and Innovation) made me appreciate that if I had thought international standardisation is a complex system, it is as nothing compared to the complexity of trying to set policy in a world with so many disparate standardisation bodies and concerns. Ms Lehouck outlined some of the things which would, and would not, appear in a forthcoming white paper on EU standardisation policy. One thing that particularly interested me was that the EU had decided (of course) on the primacy of IETF specifications in their area, even though IETF is not a formally EU-recognised body. I did say it was complex …

For my own presentation, the need for brevity meant there were quite a few interesting topics which did not survive the triage when preparing my slides – notably the widely-held UK view (though I was representing myself, not the UK) that the European-level standards institutions are, by and large, a waste of space, and that European nations should be using International Standards for all but a very few niche cases where a “European dimension” exists and a regional layer (i.e. a European layer) can bring benefits.

I also confined myself carefully to my own area of knowledge; ISO/IEC (JTC 1) ICT standardisation.

Following a few introductory slides on the functioning of JTC 1, and given the task of predicting the immediate future and describing the challenges ahead, I focussed on four main headings, as set out in the sections that follow.

Resisting vendor encroachment

The points here are:

• Vendors dislike international standardisation (when it does not function in their favour)

Anybody who has read my earlier piece will find the background argument to this familiar: international standardisation is an activity for nations and vendors have no standing. From time to time this causes upset (and in part explains some of the vendor-led assault on the integrity of the European standards institutions following the passage of OOXML).

• Expect continual pressure for a means of “direct participation” by vendors

A corollary of the above is a continued attempt for vendors to participate (i.e. have voting rights) in the international process. My own view on this is quite stark: vendors must never be allowed such rights.

• Governments must strongly resist this and maintain the de jure institutions such as ISO for their own use as bulwarks against corporate tyranny

My point here is that the international standards organisations are made “by governments, for governments”. The use of the words “corporate tyranny” are quite strong – but for myself I am convinced that the power afforded to corporations by the data collection and inspection efforts they may now mount today mean that, more than ever, governments are necessary to keep corporations, rapacious beasts that they are, in check.

Surprisingly (to me) it was this view which gathered most negative reaction, with a view expressed around the table that standards should be made “by industry for industry” and that governments should generally not interfere (much was also made of the distinction between a nation’s view and the view of that nation’s government – which I should treat with more rigour). Of course this is partly right too. I think I need to find a more nuanced way of describing how “industry” may be involved, but without being allowed the final say, at least in international standardisation. I think though, I have a wider view of the social dimension government can bring, and a sharper suspicion of the evils of corporatism, than seems to be currently common in EU circles. I’d never thought of myself as left-wing before. Hmmm.

Effects of economic slowdown

• It is difficult for vendors to commit staff to standardisation activities when under economic pressure

As predictions go, this one doesn’t require much insight. Already the ICT industry is seeing lay-offs in large numbers as the global recession bites. There is always a danger when the pressure is on that standardisation is seen as a luxury, non-gainful activity – and the kinds of gurus and thought-leaders in corporations who do this stuff can find their jobs under threat.

• Health and survival of vendor-led consortia threatened

On a larger level, corporations themselves (those that survive) might come to see participation in standards activities as something which might be given a rest. For consortia which depend on the corporate dollar this can present a challenge. Some commentators, for example, see the W3C’s (perfectly reasonable) recent announcement of validator donation program (“we really can use that money”) as just such evidence of the negative impact of recession on standardisation.

• Standardisation needs to be recognised as of much as a market-enabler as pure innovation; governments may assist

This is the nub: standardisation is (when it is done well) a first-class form of market enablement. Yet the myopic corporations are not generally in a position to see this, and even if they can they have no interest (they tend to be interested only in markets in which they are confident they can win, rather than in market creation in the general sense). And so this is a perfect example of where governments, with their (one hopes) wider and longer-term view, can intervene by continuing to support standards activities through supporting their National Standards Bodies.

Reform / modernisation

• The publishing business model of many European standards bodies (“selling pages”) is out of tune with the realities of modern ICT standardisation

The broken business model of National Standards Bodies is a serious problem. With ICT standards often (by demand) being given away free-of-charge the traditional means by which NBs can recoup the cost of making standards has gone away. Why, then, should they bother? I have no quick answer to this question, but I expect an answer would involve the need to have both governments and vendors contributing more to the financial cost of creating international ICT standards.

• Some European bodies assist experts in standardisation in their duties, but this is far from universal

Related to this is the fact the individual experts who are not employed by corporations can find it difficult to contribute to international standardisation – especially when international travel is required. Some enlightened standards bodies (the UK for example) do help defray these expenses but it would be worthwhile to see this kind of support more widely and consistently deployed throughout the European nations. The danger is that if independents cannot be funded, the void will be entirely filled by well-funded corporate employees, and the ensuing lack of balance would be regrettable.

• The Directives governing JTC 1 standardisation are archaic and confusing and in need of improvement

Another kind of reform that is needed is that of the JTC 1 Directives themselves. This dovetails with the above two points as securing this kind of reform requires dedicated experts – it will not just happen by itself.

IPR reform

• The patent spectres haunting innovation in ICT are also at work in the standards arena

The discussion around IPR, and particularly patents, in the EU is a vibrant one. My own view is that software patents are A Bad Thing but if we are to have them then standardisation could have a particular role to play in the standardisation landscape.

• Ideally, an International Standard should provide a guarantee of freedom from IPR encumbrance

This idea (first raised on this blog by André Rebentisch) is that a certain class of International Standards could provide a “safe haven” for implementers, who should feel secured against legal action for any implementations that arise directly from the use of that standard.

• Governments (the EU) could usefully legislate in this area

The way this could be practically achieved is for the EU to legislate that for certain de jure standards (JTC 1 ones, in my examples) which are labelled as unencumbered, there was an absolute defence against patent actions centred around IPR embodied therein. IANAL, but this kind of thing could usefully protect innovation and further enhance and clarify the role of de jure standards organisations, and the special relationship they have with governments/nations.

Again, here I sensed I was a little out-of-tune with the consensus round the table, which seemed to hold that patents were a given, and a useful aspect of the standards landscape (of course, it difficult to tell here how much that view applied to the area of ICT on which I was focussed, and which brings its own particular difficulties). On the other hand, there was general agreement that this area was one in which a lot of further work is required.


Brussels by Night #1
Brussels by Night — Hotel Frontage.