Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag

The OOXML got a ‘yes’ vote from Norway. Here is why. It is amazing what power bureaucrats have over the decision making process of allegedly democratic nations. “Political standardism” suggests that once a standard has been accepted by a nation it should be universally upheld - but in light of the decision making process demonstrated so thoroughly in this case, and very likely in various other cases throughout the history of international standards, one has to consider that standardization is also potentially harmful.

Consider that when I plug an electrical appliance into a wall socket I can safely assume that I will get 220 volts of current from it. It is standard. If I’m in America, I can assume 110 volts. Any variation from the standard is very specially signaled - and while one could always check what current each wall socket has (and make the assumption that it won’t suddenly change at a whim from the power company), the reason we choose not to is to minimize the amount of sanity checking we need to do in our increasingly complex environment. (Here I could go tangential into infinity on why ISO 9000 is a terrible idea.)

So we use standards to minimize noise in the communication channel that is physical reality. If the standards change regularly they have failed us. If they are contrary to reality, they have failed us - i.e., if a standard is unimplementable, bares little resemblance to the way things actually are, or does not encompass the full extent of reality. (example: RFC1918 defines three unroutable networks, but in reality there are four: 192.168.0.0/24, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.0.0.0/16 and 169.254.0.0/8. The last is de facto but not de jure.)

So of what use is OOXML? It is subject to whimsical changes by Microsoft, it has been shown to be unimplementable in reality (without resorting to certain undocumented hacks), and since it is harder to implement than competing standards such as ODF, in reality it is more likely to increase noise than decrease it. (As any fly on the wall in my office can attest to.)