Open XML Final Draft
Microsoft has released the final draft of their Open XML file format specification. I submitted a detailed list of comments to ECMA, and they did respond to them. However, it’s worth noting that they made no substantive changes at all. The most serious problem is that their name model is still U.S./Western-centric. They tried to get around the problem by adding a small editorial comment that a first name is a equivalent to a given name, a last to a family, but I hardly consider this an adequate response. Their continued use of “middle” name is even more annoying, given that it doesn’t even work for many Western names; consider “J. Edgar Hoover.”
I give Microsoft credit for opening up, but make no mistake: Open XML is really not that open. It is designed by and for Microsoft, and it’s clear that all decisions on the spec were driven by their product teams. The team implementing their new bibliographic support couldn’t be bothered to make what in effect were trivial changes, and so the ECMA TC45 couldn’t be bothered to fix the spec.
Contrast this with the OpenDocument process, where the people now driving the future of the specification are in many cases unaffiliated with any of the usual players: IBM, Sun, KOffice. Moreover, all our comments and responses to them are publicly available.
