• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 1 of 7

Gallery

Ribbon tweaking

Posted on 15 Jun 2007 at 12:14

Simon Jones helps out with customising the Ribbon and joins the file format standardisation debate.

"It's true that my name appears in one part of the Kenyan submission. I personally am honoured, but am not surprised that some of my work has been used by national bodies worldwide. The information in the comments was just as public as the Grokdoc information, which I've also contributed to. [...] I do not know who Michael Breidthardt is. I've never met him, nor corresponded with him [...] The representative from Kenya must have found our contributions useful and accurate enough to stand by it and submit them as Kenya's official commentary."

I'm still waiting to see if I'll get any response from the Public Affairs department at IBM Technology and Intellectual Property, to whom Breidthardt redirected my enquiry.

As for Malaysia, Yong's country, it's been having a little local difficulty of its own. Some people had become enthusiastic about ODF and were trying to push it as a local Malaysian standard. According to Malaysian law, this would automatically mandate that all Malaysian government departments and agencies must use ODF file formats, and the local IT vendors smelled fat contracts worth millions of ringgit for changing all the government's office software to comply. Datuk Dr Mohamad Ariffin Anton, chief executive of the Malaysian standards body Sirim Bhd, has stepped in to suspend the process of approving ODF: he said that once everyone has cooled off, he will appoint a new evaluation committee and start the process over again. Dr Ariffin said there'd been some unprofessional conduct and lack of ethical standards by members of the evaluation committee, but declined to be more specific. There's some evidence, however, that certain pro-ODF members were trying to steam-roller the standard through on a two-thirds majority rather than achieve full consensus, contrary to ISO guidelines. Dr Ariffin was concerned that some committee members had been unduly influenced by international companies with a business interest in promoting ODF and shutting out competing formats such as OOXML from the local market.

After all this international hoo-ha, the ISO committee looking at adopting OOXML and ECMA-376 as an ISO standard has approved it to proceed to the next stage on the fast track. The committee must spend the next five months working on the perceived contradictions and objections registered by the 20 national standards bodies to see if they can be resolved. This could be done by clarifying the wording, by changing the specification or by changing people's minds - and of these the last can sometimes be the hardest. Will it all be over by October? I doubt it.