Ooh’s and Aaah’s for March 19th

Ooh.. (should I say Ouch!): https://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/03/how_many_defects_remain_answer.html. Once again Rob Weir is defeated (handily).

"One of the constant themes over the last year has been the theme of panic. QUICK: You only have one month to find contradictions. QUICK: You only have five months to find defects. You only have a few weeks to evaluate the Editor's comments. Every person has to read or review the whole standard. Every national body needs to have an explicit detailed position on every issue. And so on. Always under the assumption that the current stage is the last and only chance for change.

It every case this panic is has been unnecessary FUD-mongering, because at ISO there is always the scope for improving a standard. [The normal caveat that you want to get it as right as possible first time because you cannot bolt the stable door once the horse has bolted does not apply with the same strength as with a from-scratch standard because the horse has already bolted. In fact the horse has been off and running for the last 20 years! So "getting it right" relates to documentations and harmonization rather than the general shape.]"

Aah… https://www.irislink.com/Documents/pdf/200803181557/Microsoft-031808.pdf Iris announces a partnership with Microsoft for delivering OCR solutions for Open XML. Notable from this announcement:

"I.R.I.S. being a Microsoft Gold Partner, has always been investing a lot of time and effort to provide the best support of the Microsoft formats in all of its products, said Pierre De Muelenaere, I.R.I.S. Group President and CEO. For instance, we recently announced new capability to convert images into fully-searchable XPS files and also hyper-compressed XPS files, using our iHQC™ document compression technology. More and more customers are confronted to situation where they need to convert documents from one format to another. A typical example is the need to convert massive amount of existing Tiff Group IV documents to fully-searchable PDF, PDF-A or XPS documents, for more advanced ECM applications, or to ODF or OpenXML for document repurposing. Our solutions, allow the user to select the format that best suits its needs"

Ooh… https://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/03/13/open-xml-sdk-roadmap.aspx The Open XML SDK is announced, making it easier for developers to work with Office file formats.

"After nine months of developer feedback on the Open XML SDK, we have some good news today: a roadmap for releasing the API. We have two versions coming: a version 1.0 that will be released in May, and then a version 2.0 that will be available as a CTP this summer, and will be released around the time of the next major release of Office (Office "14")."

Allow me to return the favor of posting Doug's photo on my blog. Here's the famous "Hug Madogh" doing one of the things he does best:

Aah… https://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/03/18/ongoing-support-for-is-29500-open-xml.aspx And for all my new fans at Groklaw, Brian Jones has also posted on the Chris Capossela open letter, noting our intent to support DIS29500 in it's post BRM-state in our products. Hopefully the repetition will help a little bit.

Ooh.. https://idippedut.dk/post/2008/03/IBM-is-now-fighting-from-the-trenches.aspx Speaking of Groklaw, I was glad to see Jesper Lund Stocholm offer a comment on the SFLC report. I'm always a fan of folks who bring reason and logic to the table to discuss things. The folks on Groklaw were apparently pretty upset that I stopped comments on my SFLC post, so they now have increased opportunities to share their thoughts on the topic.