Archive for the 'Standards' Category

ODF approved as Swedish Standard

Without making a press release or public announcement the Swedish Standards Institute has formally approved ODF 1.0 as a national standard. Only the “SS” prefix in SS-ISO/IEC 26300:2008 give away the status of the document.

The increasing number of concurrent browser connections

While I was catching up on the development of IE8 I found this over at the IE blog: In IE8 Beta 1 we also increased our per-server connection limit from 2 to 6. What this means is that in IE7 and below pages could only download 2 elements from a given server at any one [...]

Standards require reference implementations!

First, some people bash Microsoft for not implementing DIS 29500 (OOXML) in Office 2007. Then, someone discovers that OpenOffice 2.4 does not create proper ODF. (Update: The test procedure was wrong). And then, Microsoft announce that a coming Office service pack will add native ODF support to Microsoft Office ahead of OOXML support. And, South [...]

Does your webserver give HEAD?

In the process of constructing a crawler that finds and checks PDF documents on a website I discovered a lot of sites that don’t return information for HEAD requests. A HEAD request should return the same set of HTTP headers as a normal GET request only without the actual payload. The typical response seem to [...]

Microsoft Word 2007/2008 Interoperability

Opening a particular Word 2007 document in Word 2008 can yield this error: Seriously? Can’t Microsoft get their own implementations to cooperate better? And this has just been approved as an ISO standard?

When “standards schmandards” could have been used for something else

I own the domain name standards-schmandards.com which I use for my accessibility blogging. Recent events have made me wonder if I shouldn’t use it to cover recent events regarding IE8 instead. Or, as Mark Pilgrim elegantly writes: Said the monk: If you give me non-standard markup, I will render it according to standards. If you [...]

How the Swedish OOXML Vote Was Bought for $57,000

Microsoft hijacked Swedish OOXML vote?Sweden is represented in the ISO through the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS). This means that our country has one of the 100 or so votes.

The member countries have had six months to consider if the Office Open XML (OOXML) format should become an ISO standard. In Sweden, SIS arranged a working group that have looked through the material. The working group were about to vote No, when a bunch of new members appeared at the final meeting.