The File Format Standards Conundrum
By Tabrez Khan
Mumbai, Mar 25, 2008

India recently rejected Microsoft's document format Office Open XML (OOXML). The Bureau of Indian Standards voted against making Openxml an ISO standard. Microsoft, in a statement released subsequently, expressed deep disappointment at the bureau's rejection of OOXML.

To put things in perspective, OOXML is the latest format of electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations, word processing, etc. This was initially developed by Microsoft and later handed over to Ecma International. Ecma further developed it to action levels as a standard called Ecma 376.

Microsoft has been gunning for the adoption of this format as a standard across the world, but the decision has been hanging fire by technical committees across the world. There's widespread sentiment that OOXML should not be considered even if supported as a standard. This may seem like taking it a bit too far but a careful analysis of the issue would reveal that this sentiment albeit far-fetched does have some plausible explanation.

One major reason for such anti-XML sentiment is that Microsoft does not intend to support its own standard. According to Microsoft once OOXML becomes a standard, it will have a governing body outside of Microsoft therefore it cannot guarantee if that governing body's decisions will be acceptable by itself.

One can imagine where this could lead to, especially in a scenario where MS holds more than 90% of the market share in office productivity suites. While the rest of the world will be hard put to keep up with OOXML, Microsoft itself will not be under any obligation to abide by those decisions of the governing body that it deems inconvenient. This, even when the new standard will be broadly compatible with its own products. The technical committee for the standard will have to forever keep playing the catch-up game after each change by Microsoft, especially since MS' changes are never properly documented.

Meanwhile the ODF format developed by Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium is gaining currency among users. This is mainly because that it allows for more open archival formats, which will ensure readability by future word processors.

The OOXML converters too seem to have a problem as they cannot convert between OOXML and ODF formats seamlessly. This is an extremely important feature for users and naturally OOXML's lack of compatibility on this front would also be looked at askance.

Microsoft's overzeal to have the OOXML format adopted as a standard seems to have let these issues remain unaddressed. With these limitations, OOXML may at best acquire the status of a technical specification (TS) that does not the very high consistency and completeness criteria of a standard.