Whenever I make a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Bristol City Council, the response invariably comes back in a proprietary Microsoft Office format (e.g. .docx, .xlsx, etc.), a practice I find less than satisfactory – not to say galling – as an advocate of free and open source software and open standards.
That being so, the following FoI request has been made today to the council:
Dear Bristol City Council,
This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.
In July 2014, the Cabinet Office announced the adoption of open standards for document viewing and collaboration in central government. See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs for details.
The standards adopted are:
– PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents;
– Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents.What plans does Bristol City Council have to emulate central government’s move and when will similar open standards be adopted by the council for communicating and collaborating with citizens.
Yours faithfully,
Steve Woods
Hopefully an answer will be forthcoming by Document Freedom Day 2015 (posts passim).
Do .docx, etc. formats count as proprietary? Am I right in understanding that their specification is fully published in the public domain in ISO/IEC IS 29500?
Hi Ben
That’s a very good question you asked.
Starting with Microsoft Office 2007, the OOXML file formats have become the default file format of Microsoft Office. The standard specifies two levels of document and application conformance, strict and transitional. However, due to the changes introduced by Microsoft in the OOXML standard, Office 2007 is not entirely in compliance with ISO/IEC 29500:2008. In addition, Microsoft Office 2010 includes support for the ISO/IEC 29500:2008 compliant version of OOXML, but it can only save documents conforming to the transitional schemas of the specification, not the strict schemas.
Furthermore, parts of the specification were never fully disclosed by Microsoft at the time of seeking approval as a standard, as is evident by such elements in the specification as autoSpaceLikeWord95, lineWrapLikeWord6 and useWord97LineBreakRules.
In addition, there was some controversy about the manner in which the standard was approved, including accusations of bribery and voting irregularities.
I believe some more disclosure has been forced out of Microsoft in the meantime, principally by the EU Commission to improve interoperability under the aegis of their unfair competition actions against MS.
For these reasons, I still regard OOXML as not being a proper open standard, unlike Open Document Format (ODF), hence my calling it proprietary.