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Open XML: to be or not to be…

All eyes are upon ISO's verdict which will come in early February 2008. What is important now is to understand the potential of having multiple standards and the reasons as to why Open XML matters. By Faiz Askari

When the debate on standards is intensifying, stakeholders are looking at ISO’s final verdict which is scheduled to come in February 2008. While several issues have been raised during this debate regarding documentation standards, advocates of Open XML (OXML) have managed to justify their views on why it should become a standard.

However, the ISO standards aren’t mandatory standards but purely voluntary. They are like a library of standards, which users can choose from. While elaborating on the relevance of having multiple standards, Vijay Kapur, National Technology Officer, Microsoft India said, “A research report by IDC shows that there is widespread support for OXML, and that there is already a lot of adoption. OXML brings a set of capabilities to the table that are not present in other standards. This will be useful to governments and industries and will enable new business scenarios.”

Interestingly, in India, while having a limited amount of knowledge on this topic, some stakeholders have started believing that the game is over for OXML and that it cannot become an ISO standard now. Although, they came to this conclusion from the meeting of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), however, the committee was not meeting to decide on Open XML becoming or not becoming a standard in India. The meeting was to decide how India would vote at the ISO on September 2.

Now that the international voting process on the issue of OXML is over, the question remains as to what will happen early next year when the ISO discloses its verdict on OXML.

While elaborating on the process involved in ratifying a standard, Vijay adds, “It is important to remember that irrespective of what the vote is, this is not the final step. As per normal procedure, there will be a period of about five to six months during which ECMA will respond on the consolidated comments given to us by ISO. In early 2008, ECMA responses will be circulated to all members, who might express their satisfaction or have further comments. If there is a good resolution to the comments, then OXML will become an ISO standard.”

However, what could be of interest today is; what if OXML becomes a standard.

While advocating the existence of multiple standards, Kapur said, “The availability of multiple standards is like enabling users of IT with additional tool for their work. There are many examples of having multiple standards in an environment. Be it the existence of JPEG or TIFF file formats in imaging or GSM or CDMA in the mobile phone industry. The availability of such standards will ultimately lead to a variety of services for users.”

However co-relating standards with innovation, Vijay adds, “If a new technology does not have a chance to get standardized because a previous standard already exists, it will naturally reduce the encouragement to excel. As an example, take the case of graphics file formats. Innovations in this space led to new JPEG standards such as JPEG 2000. These developments have made a significant impact on the quality of digital imaging.”

Data formats have been around for as long as computing. They reflect the varying capabilities and functions of different computing systems and have evolved as those computing systems have evolved. Punch cards were once commonplace, but you wouldn’t think of using them today. In the decades since, a wide range of formats (TXT, PDF, HTML, and DOC, just to name a few) have become popular because they meet specific user needs and tap into new computing capabilities as they evolve. The creation of XML-based document formats continues this evolution, and even within this category a number of formats are being developed, including ODF, Open XML and UOF. We should expect the creation of new formats in the future as the technology evolves, and, as has always been the case, users should be able to choose the formats that work best for them. Microsoft said that it has consistently supported choice and that is why it took no steps to hinder ISO/IEC’s ratification of ODF 1.0 and supported ODF 1.0’s addition to the American National Standards list. Microsoft will continue to support recognition of ODF 1.0 and other formats on such lists around the world as long as doing so in no way restricts choice among formats.

Co-existing Formats

OXML and ODF are distinct formats that serve different user needs. The argument rages on whether ISO/IEC should ratify Open XML now that ODF 1.0 has already been ratified. While differentiating the two from each other, Vijay said, “It is important to appreciate that these are fundamentally different formats that meet different needs in the marketplace, and that the standardization and use of one does not preclude the standardization and use of the other. ODF’s design may make it attractive to those users that are interested in a particular level of functionality in their productivity suite or developers who want to work with that format. Open XML may be more attractive to those who want richer functionality, the ability to integrate business data into their documents by defining their own document schema, or a format that was designed to be backwards compatible with existing documents. This is not to say that one is better than the other–just that they meet different needs in the marketplace.”

The case for OXML

At the architectural level, the Open XML specification was designed in such a way that it can be implemented on multiple operating systems involving many types of data processing applications. “From the perspective of the future, OXML was designed to enable integration of a customers’ own XML data and formats within documents to address particular scenarios, such as vertical industry requirements or organization-specific requirements,” said Kapur. Moreover, the key reasons as to why Microsoft’s customers and partners are adopting the ECMA OXML formats are the need for their own industry schemas, ease of deployment, and optimization of costs, interoperability, and rich workflow scenarios. “OXML formats are unique since they are capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of existing industry schema that organizations already use today. Around the world customers already have billions of existing documents that they want to keep using,” said Kapur.

Interoperability

Interoperability is important insofar as it paves the way for different implementations on differing platforms and technologies to work together while providing customer choice. The open nature and design of the OXML specification enables it to easily provide interoperability between not only previous versions of Microsoft Office binary file formats but also other XML based formats such as Open Document Format and more recently, the Universal Office Format designed and managed within China.

What’s new in OXML

Open XML supports XML formats similar to those generated by custom systems, the ones being passed around by Web services, right inside documents without changing a thing. “You don’t have to write any code to pull business data out of document markup, because the two never get mixed together. That enables simple, powerful interoperability. That capability is only available in a format like Open XML that uses a standardized, flexible packaging convention like OPC to allow for the addition of any type of content to a document in a way that doesn’t interfere with the document architecture itself,” said Kapur.

Having said all this, a new wave of computing driven by OXML is not going to happen overnight. However, standardizing it should be welcomed as it would lead to a new offering to the customer or user. This should not be linked to market competition and dynamics but what should be kept as a priority are the user’s demand and their choice of interface. OXML standardization could be a step in this direction.