18 posts tagged “standards”
“If this is the death of Wall Street as we know it, the tombstone will read: killed by complexity” it was suggested on the front page of the Guardian today (Tuesday 16 September 2008). A similar question might be asked about the roadmap for a number of Web developments. Is Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the Semantic Web over-complex? Are the metadata standards which are being developed too complex to be used by many software developers? The abstract for a panel session at WWW 2005 suggested that “It has been estimated that all of the Web Services specifications and proposals (“WS-*”) weigh in at several thousand pages by now”. And one of the many objections to ISO’s decision to standardise the OOXML file format was that, at 6,000 pages, it was too complex for developers in small organisations to implement.
So now’s the time for more lightweight approaches, it could be argued.
Not so, comes the counter-argument. We will need to have comprehensive, well-grounded and unambiguous standards and specifications in order to build robust services.
The current uncertainties in the financial markets of course provide more than just a analogy - they are also giving rise to uncertainties in the IT sector. This is often used as an argument to point out dangers of the dependencies on externally-hosted Web 2.0 services, as my colleague Paul Walk pointed out recently. But as I mentioned last year in a post entitled “Universities, Not Facebook, May Be Facing Collapse“, universities themselves are not immune to the financial difficulties which the banks and airline sectors are currently facing.
But into such discussions we should also add the financial stability of the standards-making organisations. Organisations which have government backing may be able to weather the storm, but what about those member consortiums whose sustainability is dependent on the financial backing of the commercial sector. And as the W3C is one such organisation, can we be confident that the development and maintenance of complex standards will be sustainable in the long run. In light of suggestion in a recent interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 standard, that the standard is unlikely to be a “Proposed Recommendation in 2022″, should we not now be asking the difficult questions regarding the sustainability of such standards which seem to have a long gestation period before they can be regarded as stable.
Or am I being unduly pessimistic? Might not any current financial uncertainties be a mere blip, and perhaps will not affect standardisation development processes along the lines I’ve hinted at? Or will a legacy of George W Bush’s economic mis-management (or Tony Blair’s if you are of a different political hue) be the failure of the HTML 5 standard to achieve its proposed recommendation status by 2022?
On the The thoughts of a Code Gorilla blog a post on Videos from Repository Fringe 2008 provides a link to a number of videos of talks given at the Repository Fringe held recently in Edinburgh. The blog is written by a software developed who has been “identified as “a free thinker” by JISC“.
The post states that the videos “will be made available via a Streaming Server at some point, however this is a microsoft-specific platform, so non-windows/non-Internet Explorer users struggle to access the data“. In order to maximise the access to the videos Code Gorilla has “uploaded them to google video“.
As I mentioned in post on the Open Standards and the JISC IErecently at one stage there was a fairly hard line view that open standards must be adopted in order to provide device independence - in the case of multimedia, W3C’s SMIL standard wold seem to be particularly relevant for synching audio, video and other resources such as presentation files. However as we see in this example, the vision that we had several years ago has failed to have any significant impact, as instead it is the popular services such as Google Video and YouTube which are being used to deliver such resources, as well as providing additional functionality, such as user comments and the ability to embedded the resources in other pages, as illustrated below.
It is also interesting to note that this also provides a good example of a pragmatic approach to the accessibility of such resources. At one stage, when the SENDA legislation was being deployed, there was a feeling in some circles that institutions would need to remove videos from their services unless they could provide full captioning. We now, however, widely accept the view that we need to take ‘reasonable measures’ to provide accessible alternatives - and that removing resources does not improve their accessibility.
So my congratulations to the ‘free thinker’ who has so clearly demonstrated that the naive views that we used to have can, in circumstances such as this, be ignored in order to maximise benefits to the user and provide cost-effective solutions.
It is appropriate to embed this video of Dorothea Salo’s keynote talk at the Repository Fringe 2008, with her comments that “idealism isn’t enough” and “programmers are moving towards flexibility”.
And finally I should add that at the end of this video clip (45 minutes in) Dorothy mentions the impacts that both Paul Walk and Andy Powell are having in questioning some of the assumptions which have been made in the past regarding the technical approaches taken to institutional repositories.
We do need more ‘free thinkers’, I feel.
Back in May 2008 I published a blog post entitled George Bush IS President And Microsoft’s Office Open XML Format IS An ISO Standard which described how Microsoft’s Open Office XML (OOXML) had been approved as an ISO standard. However in the period between first writing the post and then publishing it South Africa, Brazil, India and Venezuela lodged appeals against this decision claiming that the voting process was marred by irregularities. So until ISO had addressed these appeals we could say that OOXML was not an ISO standard. However as described in an article on OOXML Gets Final Nod After Standards Body Rejects Appeals ISO has now has formally rejected these appeal.
The analogy I drew with George W Bush was even more appropriate than I had anticipated - just as there were doubts over the legitimacy of Bush’s first election victory which were eventually rejected, so the appeals against the legitimacy over the standardisation of OOXML have been rejected, with OOXML now becoming an official ISO standard. I suspect many readers of this blog would have preferred it if neither of these decisions had happened, but they have.
Whether this is the end of the matter is not yet clear: a article on CONSEGI 2008 Declaration — Open Letter to ISO Reveals More OOXML Issues published on the Grocklaw site describes how South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay and Cuba have signed and sent an open letter to ISO condemning this decision. Further information about the standardisation process is available in a Wikipedia article on Standardization of Office Open XML.
But although the standardisation process may have been flawed with, no doubt, political skullduggery going on, the technical merits of the standards questionable and the likelihood that the standard will actually be implemented by vendors questioned by some, we now, I would say, have to accept that it is an ISO standard. But as I’ve argued for other reasons recently, we should in any case be questioning the significance and merits of open standards much more questioningly than we have done in the past, when slogans such as ‘interoperability though open standards’ seem to have been used to stifle discussions and debates on the extent to which open standards actually deliver their stated goals.
It was also pleasing to read Ross Gardler, manager of the JISC OSS Watch service’s comment on my recent post in which suggests that “it is possible to diverge from [open] standards without enforcing locking. This is a huge advantage when it takes so long for standards to be specified and agreed by committees and standards bodies” - he could, of course, have added caveats regarding the political nature of standardisation processes.
I therefore welcome Ross’s statement that “OSS Watch would be happy to explore these ideas further. Just what are the advantages and disadvantages of formalised standards against open implementations of data formats?” And over the next few weeks I will publish a number of posts in which I’ll invite discussions on standards issues.
For this post, however, I’d welcome comments specifically on the OOXML standardisation process and the implications of ISO’s decision. My view is that it’s a good thing when proprietary formats become standardised (as has also happened recently with the standardisation of Adobe’s PDF format which was announced on 2 July 2008) as this can be beneficial for, for example, long term preservation. However this doesn’t necessarily mean that the format will be appropriate in many circumstances - we do need to decouple the view that because an open standard is available in a particular area that it should necessarily be deployed, I feel.
The Ariadne article on Lost in the JISC Information Environment has generated some interesting discussions, including my colleague Paul Walk’s post in which he suggests that all models are wrong, but some are useful and Andy’ Powell’s post entitled Lost in the JISC Information Environment?.
I’ll leave the discussions on the technical architecture to others, but thought I’d pick up on Andy’s comment that:
.. the technical standards certainly were intended to be prescriptive. I can remember discussions in UKOLN about the relative merits of such an approach vs. a more ad hoc, open-ended and experimental one but I argued at the time that we wouldn’t build a coherent environment if we just let people do whatever the hell they wanted. Maybe I was wrong?
Myself, Andy, Pete Johnston and Paul Miller were the ones who had those long discussions about the role of open standards and the JISC Information Environment (IE). I was the person, who had been introduced to standards through my involvement with the Web from its early days, who was the most adamant on the need to use open standards, where open meant the standard had been ratified by a trusted neutral standards organisation, such as the W3C. I was therefore never in favour of standards and protocols which weren’t open in this sense, including Adobe’s PDF or Sun’s Java. On the other hand, I was always fairly relaxed about the technologies used to implement the services, not being too concerned if licensed software was felt to provide advantages over open source alternatives, for example.
It was Paul Miller who suggested than my stance on open standards was too inflexible, suggesting that there was a spectrum to openness, rather than a fixed binary divide. As a result of Paul’s comments and subsequent discussions in UKOLN I wrote a briefing document which suggested that rather than seeking a formal definition of open standards, we needed a more flexible approach based on an understanding of the characteristics of open standards. And the need for such flexibility became even more apparent when the success of RSS had to be balanced against the lack of formal standardisation of RSS (both 1.0 and 2.0).
And in retrospect many of the W3C standards which I had felt should form the basis of the JISC IE have clearly failed to have any significant impact in the market place - compare, for example, the success of Macromedia’s Flash (SWF) format with the niche role that W3C’s SMIL format has.
Just as the open source debate seems to have matured (and I think that the JISC OSS Watch service has helped to move that debate from the polarised opinions we were seeing several years ago) we still need, I feel, to have a much more sophisticated understanding of the role open standards have to play in development activities. And, as with the decisions institutions (and individuals) have to make regarding their use of externally-hosted Web 2.0 services, so funders, developers and project managers will need to give more thought to the risks as well as the promised benefits of use of open standards.
I’ve written, in conjunction with staff from CETIS, OSS Watch and the AHDS, a number of peer-reviewed papers on this topics ( Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access, Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards, A Contextual Framework For Standards, A Standards Framework For Digital Library Programmes and Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites). I suspect it is time to revisit this topic.
I was looking at a page on the W3C Web site recently to update my knowledge of the SVG specification and SVG tools. I noticed a link at the bottom of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) page to an RSS feed for the page, and, as a fan of RSS syndication, thought it might be worth adding this feed to my RSS viewer. However when I clicked on the link, rather than seeing the RSS feed and having the option to add this to my preferred RSS reader, an error message was displayed:
Now validating this RSS feed with the RSS validator on the W3C Web site informs me of an error with the feed:
Sorry
This feed does not validate.
- line 227, column 87: (5 occurrences) [help]
... ability as well as the Internet Explorer® Plugin and the Windows® ...
This feed does not validate.
It seems that either W3C’s workflow process has failed to removed the registered trademark character for the term “Internet Explorer®” or the RSS schema has failed to included a declaration for this character entity.
No big deal, you may think - and, as the page isdisplayed in the FireFox browser, this is surely another failure of Internet Explorer to follow Web standards.
But if you view the page in Opera you get an XML parser error message:
And here, I think, both Internet Explorer and Opera seem to be obeying the requirement that user agents aren’t expected to render non-compliant pages.
And this hard line approach has been promoted as a vision of the future of the Web by the W3C. It has been argued that mandating rigourous compliance with specs would help to maximise interoperabilty.
This may be true - but at what cost. As someone who studied engineering at University I am aware of the benefits of a fail-safe approach to design, so that if one small component fails it doesn’t mean that the building will collapse. But in this case one small component (the trademark character entity) which hasn’t been properly defined, has led to a total failure for the page to be rendered in two browsers.
Don’t we need Web resources to be designed so they’ll fail gracefully and will be tolerant if humans make mistakes or, as it seems is the case here, there are failures in the workflow?
SCA Home Nations Forum
I recently facilitated a series of breakout sessions on Standards at the SCA Home Nations Forums, held in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff. The aim of the sessions was to discuss the approaches which are being taken to the use of standards by SCA partners in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
The first event included a plenary talk on “The Standards Dilemma” given by Alastair Dunning, JISC, and I’ve embedded his slides in my blog post.
Alistair’s blog post about the first event, entitled “Digital Standards: Going beyond Stalin“, summarised some of the difficulties which have been experienced in seeking to deploy open standards in digital library development work.
eLib Standards Document
These concerns were reflected in the breakout sessions at the three events. And when I was preparing the breakout session I though it would be useful to review my involvement in standards work, which date back to my contribution to the eLib Standards document, published in February 1996.
In that document I was fascinated to discover some of the open standards which we thought would lead to interoperability for eLib projects. The document mentioned the Open Document Architecture (ODA) standard but went on to (correctly) predict that “It is unclear what future there is for the ODA standard” and stated that “It is not recommended for use in the eLib programme“.
Rather than using ODA, the standards document “anticipated that SGML will be a key standard for eLib“. The document “encouraged [projects] to work together to agree or, where necessary, develop document type definitions“. Although SGML was used by a number of projects (such as, I think, project which used the TEI DTD) SGML did not have a significant role to play for many of the eLib projects until a simplified version of SGML, XML, became available. The exception to that generalisation was HTML. My contributution to the eLib standards document was to write: “Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) is simply a DTD which prescribes formats for presentation and display. Hypertext documents in the World Wide Web are written in HTML. eLib projects will make heavy use of HTML and should use HTML 2 and HTML 3 when it is stable. Netscape and other vendor-specific extensions are deprecated.“
It was in the area of standards identifiers, metadata and searching in which the recommendations are most interesting. The document (correctly) stated that “eLib projects should be able to supply a URL for public services” - although in retrospect we should have said “a static and stable URL”. But the above sentence then went on to say the “… and be prepared to adopt URNs when they are stabilised“. The URN (Uniform Resource Name) was envisaged as “a persistent object identifier, assigned by a ‘publisher’ or some authorising agent“. Now today, 12 years later, project Web sites still have a URL for their resources, with other approaches to identifiers (such as DOIs) only being used in specialised areas, such as providing identifiers for journal articles or, in projects such as E-Bank, molecules.
Regarding metadata standards, the document stated:
Relevant standards for resource description: US-MARC, IAFA, TEI headers
although it immediately added the caveat that “This is an area in which there is still much research and development and where it is premature to suggest one preferred approach“.
The document also suggested that the WHOIS++ cross-search protocol could have an important role to play for searching metadata held in the IAFA templates. Indeed the e-Lib-funded ROADS open source software, which underpinned several of the eLib Subject-Based Information Gateways (such as SOSIG and OMNI), was based on this approach.
Discussion
I feel there is much which can be learnt by reviewing the experiences of digital library programmes such as eLib - indeed eLib projects were themselves expected to be open in reviewing their experiences, both positive and negative. Looking at the standards document with the benefit of 12 years of hindsight we can smile at its naivety. But we should also ask why certain standards, which failed to gain acceptance, were encouraged in the first place? An answer, perhaps, is to be found in the interests of the contributors to the standards document. Anne Mumford (a former colleague of my when I worked at Loughborough University) was actively involved in the development of the CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile) standard, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this standard was included in the standards document.
What have we learnt since 1996? Do we ensure that we have more disinterested processes for recommendations? A recent Tweet from Owen Stephens, related to a TechWatch report on “Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions” suggested that this is not the case: “[I] was suprised how pro-METS [the report] was until I noted “Richard Gartner is [...] is a member of the editorial board for the METS“. Which current exciting new standard will turn out to be tomorrow’s whois++ I wonder?
On 2nd April 2008 the IT Week magazine described how “Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format standard has been approved as an ISO standard” in an article entitled “OOXML gets the nod as an ISO standard“.
Everyone who has been critical of Microsoft for continuing to promote its proprietary Office format should be pleased with this news, one might think. And indeed an editorial comment in the same issue of IT Week a piece entitled “Microsoft wins format standards” suggested that the “ISO vote endorsing OOXML ends vicious committee wrangling“. But the article admitted that the “decision means that there are now two ISO document standards“. And further “Supporters of the rival Open Document Format claimed OOXML is not truly open because it was not designed by an open process“. In addition they also suspect “Microsoft will find ways to retain control“.
Rowan WIlson on the JISC OSS Watch blog elaborated on these concerns: “the perception that OOXML is in itself an inadequate standard which has triumphed through Microsoft’s expertise at lobbying ISO member bodies for their votes“; “the standard is itself is incredibly long and complex - over six thousand pages” and “Microsoft’s patent non-enforcement promise that accompanies [the standard]“. Similar concerns are described in a Wikipedia entry on OOXML.
But do such criticisms mean that we should not make use of OOXML? I would say not. If you believe in open standards, then you should be prepared to accept standards which have been ratified by a formal standards body. Just as when George W Bush first became president, despite the concerns regarding the voting process and allegations of corruption in certain states, the Democratic party was prepared at accept this decision.
The criticism that “there are now two ISO document standards” misses the point that duplicated standards are not unusual, as the joke “the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose” illustrates. Indeed, readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 - not two versions of the same standard, but two different standards - RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication Standard (to say nothing of its original name Rich Site Summary). The battles which have taken place over this popular syndication format seem to be typical of the standardisation process in the IT sector. So we should not be surprised to read of dissent in the document format area.
I suspect that a lot of criticism of the standard is really aimed at seeking to persuade organisations that they shouldn’t be using Microsoft Office products. But that, I feel, is a different argument. Rather I’ll leave the final comment to Richard Boulderstone, the chief technology officer at the British Library who has welcomed OOXML’s approval as an ISO standard, as the establishment of an open well-defined OOXML standards will ensure documents can be viewed through future applications: “We think hundreds of years in the future, by which point this standard won’t be supported anymore. But we’ll be able to create an application to views these documents as they’re based on an open format. Under the closed proprietary format previously used by Microsoft we couldn’t do that.“. Amen to that.
Myself, Mike Ellis (Eduserv) and Ross Gardler (JISC OSS Watch) are the co-authors of a paper on “What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?” which has been accepted for the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. And I’m pleased that David Bearman (conference co-chair) response when he read the paper was that it should be discussed in a Professional Forum at the conference. Indeed David’s comment on the paper was “it sounds like it could be the most amazing session at MW this year”
The paper suggests that openness can include open standards, open source, open APIs, open access and an open culture (i.e. a willingess to encourage user-generated content). But the paper also acknowledges that there is a downside to each of these aspects. Some of these concerns were raised by Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the MDA in a thread on “The speculative aspect of using Web 2″ on the MCG JISCMail list. Nick commented:
… ‘how can you be so naïve’? Low cost of entry? We were promised that with Open Source Software and it turned out to be no cheaper. Reaching audiences while we sleep? They told us Z39.50 and interoperability would solve that and we’re still not there. Content Management will make everyone a publisher? You just try and get a username and password out of the Council IT Admin.
I’m pleased that Nick raised such concerns. He’s right when he suggests that the potential benefits of both open source and open standards have been over-hyped. And, similarly, the benefits of Web 2.0 can also be exaggerated. But my response to the concerns raised by Nick are to argue that we need to develop more sophisticated ways of engaging with these aspects of openness - and just because policy makers appear to feel that simply mandating use of open standards and open source software will be sufficient to deliver their benefits, doesn’t mean we are faced with the binary choice of accepting or rejecting such views. Rather we need to engage in discussions and debate on ways in which real benefits can be realised.
I’ve been involved in working collaboratively with others in developing models for exploiting the potential of open standards and open source software. At the Museums and the Web 2.007 conference I presented a paper on Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards, co-authored with my colleague Marieke Guy and Alastair Dunning (then of AHDS). These ideas were further developed and extended to include open source and an open access in a paper on Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access co-authored by Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS) and Randy Metcalfe (then of JISC OSS Watch).
But there’s a need to build on these approaches and to develop approaches for exploiting other aspects of openness. And such approaches need to recognise the dangers and difficulties. But just because there are difficulties, doesn’t mean we should reject openness - rather it means we need to continue having the debate, whether it’s on mailing list such as the MCG list, on this blog or at the professional forum at the Museums and The Web 2008 conference. So I’ll ask here the questions w’ll be discussing in a few day’s time: what does openness mean to your community, what are the benefits it can provide, what are difficulties which are likely to be faced and, most importantly, how do you feel such difficulties should be overcome.
Your feedback is warmly welcomed.
I discovered the Web in December 1992 and, after Christmas, helped to set up the institutional Web site at the University of Leeds. Later that month I met Robert Cailliau, a colleague of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, when Robert was in Leeds visit relatives. Robert gave me the background to the developments of the Web and it was around that time I subscribed to the www-talk mailing list. This was the start of my belief in a Web based on standards developed by an open community. And I can remember the controversy caused when NCSA, in their development of the Mosaic browser, broke with the consensus in the format of the IMG tag. Marc Andreessen made a proposal which generated debate. However Marc chose to ignore Tim’s suggestions:
Tim Berners-Lee writes:
> Let the IMG tag be INCLUDE and let it refer to an arbitrary document
> type. Or EMBED if INCLUDE sounds like a cpp include which people
> will expect to provide SGML source code to be parsed inline — not
> what was intended.
We’re not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point; it raises a
number of nasty issues that are quite separate from the idea of
inlined images.
What happened was that Mosaic was released to universal acclaim. But later, when the lack of extensibility of the IMG tag became apparent, the Netscape browser was released and introduced a more effective way of embedding content other than images, using the EMBED tag. And Marc promoted supported support for this proprietary tag over the limited IMG tag as a killer feature of Netscape. Similar tactics which Microsoft have been guilty of over the years.
It’s not just Microsoft, you have to be wary of software vendors in general as they all have vested interests in proprietary lock-in, has been my belief over the years. Stick with the W3C, I’ve felt. They are independent of vendors and will be best positioned to provide open standards which everyone can use, I’ve argued over the years.
But over time I’ve begun to question the wisdom of this view. I raised this issue last June in a post entitled “Are W3C Crazy?” in which I picked up on a comment made by Phil Wilson, a Web developer based at the University of Bath. Phil told me, based on his attendance at the XTech 2007 conference that:
There seemed to be a couple of big fat W3C elephants in the room.
The first was that the w3c are doing stuff for use in five or ten years’ time whereas most of the other talks are about things you can do today or next year, which makes them seem like futurologists.
The other is that they really didn’t seem that happy that HTML5 was going ahead, and what the hell was wrong with XHTML2 anyway?
It must be nice to work in a standards organisation where everything you do meets some Platonic Idea of perfection.
Are W3C working in a purist world in which everything needs to meet a Platonic idea of perfection? Others, including long standing Web standards evangelists, seem to be raising similar concerns. Molly (of Molly.com, a well-known author of dozens of books on Web standards) is the latest to raise her concerns. In a post on “From Web Standards Diva to Web Standards Devo“ she makes a startling suggestion:
I’m going to design my new site with frames, tables, spacer gifs, lots of flash embedded into framed pages via iframes. I’m going to use non-semantic, presentational HTML, table based layouts, and lots of inline CSS.
The frightening issue is that I can build such a site so it will validate, pass at least WCAG priority 1 accessibility and have effective SEO.
However she goes on to say:
The mere fact that I can actually do all that and be in compliance with specs should help clarify my point, I hope. It’s not the specs that define Web Standards. We are talking about best practices. We use the term “standards” fast and loose, and for an industry that is so interested in semantics, I find it endlessly ironic that we have chosen such a piss poor description to define a certain level of professional practices.
This post is a follow-up from one on “Web Standards Aren’t” which, as with many of Molly’s posts, succeeds in generating much debate, including contributions from some of the leading lights in Web standards development work.
I met Molly at the W4A 2005 conference when I gave a paper on “Forcing Standardization or Accommodating Diversity? A Framework for Applying the WCAG in the Real World“. This was my radical paper in which I suggested, to a room full of Web accessibility experts, that Web accessibility wasn’t about conforming with a technical set of universal standards, but in identifying best practices which would support users in the particular tasks they were engaged in. Molly, who I didn’t know at the time, supported various comments I made at the conference, which led to various late night drinking sessions at the conference (but I won’t go into that!)
And now Molly is taking the debate even further. and other leading standards-based developers are raising similar concerns, such as Andy Clark’s post dated 11 February 2008 on “transcending the web of today” in which he suggests:
Transcending is about moving away from outdated notions, for example that a design should look the same in all browsers. It is about designing the best possible visual experience for people using the best browsers (and then considering what happens for people using outdated technologies). This is the opposite of progressive enhancement where a designer would design for the most common, lowest common denominator browser (even it is the least capable), and then add extra visual decoration to reward people who use more modern software. Transcending about designing the best for the best.
If leading lights such as Molly and Andy (who have both published books on Web standards, given many prresentations on this topic and beern active in W3C working groups) are questioning the W3C vision, we should pay heed. Have W3C lost the authority they once had? Have the dangers posed by software vendors leading the development of standards simply been replaced by the dangers of a group of researchers and purists who are happy to develop sophisticated solutions which may fail to gain acceptance in the marketplace?
It’s not longer just a question of passively accepting the vision of the standards developers, I’m afraid. And if you don’t believe me, tell me -do you think the future lies in W3C’s XHTML 2 standard (July 2006 draft) or W3C’s HTML 5 standard (hmm, latest draft came out on 11 February 2008)? If there’s a schism within W3C and W3C Consortium Members such as Microsoft, Sun, Opera and Google, which sect will you follow? Or do you feel the need to avoid the religious wars and join the agnostics?
A JISC TechWatch report on XML-based Office Document Standards (TSW0702) has just been published. As described on the TechWatch Web site:
This TechWatch report explains these issues and some of the standards involved. It proposes that although the UK higher and further education sector has, for a long time, understood the interoperability benefits of open standards, it has been slow to translate this into easily understandable guidelines for implementation at the level of everyday applications such as office document formats. As far as education is concerned, the use of modifiable office document formats has now reached a crucial stage. There is an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats.
The report, written by Walter Ditch, (and featured in The Register and on ZDnet) provides a very useful background to the needs for open document formats, a discussion about what openness means in this context (which references two of my papers on “Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access” and “A Contextual Framework For Standards“) and provides a summary of the strengths and weakness of the Open Document Format (ODF) and the Office Open XML format (OOXML).
The report argues that it is now timely for the HE sector to address the issue of how we should move away from use of proprietary office file formats. The report doesn’t make a recommendation on which format(s) we should adopt or on the deployment strategies we will need - and I think the report is wise in this respect, as any decisions taken now may be made redundant by decisions to be made by ECMA regarding the standardisation of OOXML in the near future. However the report does provide very useful information which will help to inform future discussions.
Recommended reading for a topic which, as Paul Anderson, the technical editor of the report, says on his blog there is ”a searing debate about which particular XML format all these software packages should make use of and which standard they should use“. Paul goes on to say “It’s an indication of how deeply these issues are felt and how bitter the XML standardisation battle has become. It really is a war of words.” Paul’s editorial role and the peer-reviewing process for this report have helped to ensure that the content of the report provides a neutral summary of the background to the standardisation processes.
