RE: [xml-dev] Results of Open XML balloting at INCITS

["Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

Jim Melton said:

> When standards are important -- mandatory
> or merely corporate policy -- it's nice to have one good standard
> from which to choose; minimally, there "must" be clear criteria for
> making the choice between multiple, overlapping or conflicting,
> standards.

I see that Oracle supports XQuery as well as SQL now. What are the clear
criteria for someone to use when choosing between W3C XQuery and ISO SQL?

(B.t.w., how do you "choose" from a single thing?  :-)

> Why, then, would the owner of the proprietary spec care whether or
> not that spec becomes an international standard?  It's simple: To be
> able to persuade customers who want a truly neutral standard that
> will keep them out of vendor lock-in to believe that their
> proprietary spec satisfies that need so the customers will buy
> products built to that "proprietary-standard" spec instead of the
> more neutral one.

Jim, you present this as if is all about the Clash of the Titans.

You are dismissing all the calls from my industry for years (decades) that
MS should adopt markup, document its formats, open its IP, sumbit to
standards processes. In 2004 the European Community explicitly recommended
that MS should do this.

(ODF does not supercede these requests, because ODF was designed for a
different purpose and has different capabilities. In four or five years,
ODF will be much better though. The analogy with database query languages
is not a very good one.)

Now I know that the industrial markup and publishing community is not on
the radar of database companies. Witness the complete disregard of our
needs in the XML Schema development process, which in turn lead to the
move to ISO and the progressive development of DSDL, which has become
popular and useful in its small niche but has absolutely no commercial
support for the big vendors. I don't expect you guys to understand what we
in the industrial markup and publishing community do, or the value that
having a standardized baseline format for document conversions out of
Office (e.g. to ODF or any other target) would have for us. But please
don't treat this as merely a game between the elephants.

I am happy to put a big red label on ISO Office Open XML saying "Only for
use by adults" or "Read the label before opening" or "This standard is
only recommended use in data converters, archives and integrated systems."

> I'll grant you this: that's a politico-economic argument rather than
> a technical one.  But politics and economics are ultimately how most
> of us manage to get paid a salary.

Are you serious? That applies to a handful of technocrats.

> If my competitor gains
> significant market advantage by having his specs anointed in a manner
> that moves customers from my products to his, then I've got a
> problem.  Sure, I'd like to do that to him, but a much more palatable
> approach to the many fleas on the elephants (so to speak) is to have
> vendor-neutral specs on which even the fleas have had some direct
> influence.

Fleas?

Cheers,
Rick Jelliffe