UnNews:Apple to get its own OoOQTF document format approved by ISO

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

3 April 2008

A member of ISO examines the new OoOQTF documentation

Cupertino, California - Apple has recently decided to get its OoOQTF (Obviously only Open Quicktime Format) approved by ISO (International Organization for Standardization). Apple believes that with Linux having a standard document format, ODF, and Microsoft having OOXML, Apple needs to get its own standard approved to compete with the other standards.

"It is nice to have several competing international standards," said ISO president Håkan Murby, "For example, there is only one standard for the sizes of passenger car tyres.[1] What if Ford or Toyota could come up with a better international standard? And maybe a different company could come up with an even better international standard. With several competing international standards, we could test them against each other in the marketplace to see which company has a better marketing department. The current ISO standard for car tyres has become so universally accepted that we will never know if a different set of sizes might work better."

The new document formats might seem confusing at first, so here is some clarification: ODF stands for "Open Document Format", and was invented by Sun Microsystems and developed by the Open Office XML technical committee. It was originally used with the word processor called OOo, or "OpenOffice.org". OOXML stands for "Office Open XML" and was invented by Microsoft. Office Open XML ("Office" comes first) has nothing to do with the Open Office XML technical committee ("Open" comes first). Also, OpenOffice.org has nothing to do with the new "Office Open XML" format (again, it's "Office Open", not "Open Office").

The New OoOQTF stands for "Obviously only Open Quicktime Format". It was invented by Apple. OoOQTF has nothing to do with OOo (In one the lower case "o" is in the middle, and in the other it is at the end).

When asked to comment, Steve Jobs said "OMG ROTFL"

Specifications for the new format

ODF has a huge 600 page documentation. Not to be outdone, Microsoft's new OOXML format has a 6000 page documentation. The new OoOQTF documentation is Over 9000* pages. It is a collection of old formats from the eighties and nineties, code including "improvements" developed while drunk and sleep deprived, and crayon drawings from the Apple developers' children. It is extensively self-referential and redundant, and some of the self-referential parts reference parts that reference back to the referencing parts, in a continuous loop that never seems to say anything concrete and exists like a closed space-time loop within the format.

Then, after the introduction, is an other 40,000 pages of specific technical definitions, most of which do not seem to apply to storing documents. Then there are 2000 pages that are almost completely blank, with a few pieces of what look like doodling, including "lol caturday" and "Steve wuz here". When flipped quickly, part of the top right corner of some of these 2000 pages appears to be an animated animal of some kind. Then there are 25,000 pages of documentation of code specific to Quicktime, a program which is not open source. Every few pages it says "this is an open source format". The next 1000 pages seem to document the circuitry of a transistor radio. The last 19,000 pages reference all the previous sections in a way that seems like it might be the documentation for a document format, but nobody has been able to follow the hundreds of thousands of complex references, many of which have their own references, to be able to understand the format, at all, except Apple. The documentation for the standard is a total of 60,000 pages.

*It's over NINE THOUSAAAAAAND!!!!!

ISO certification

At a conference yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs talked about the format. "This format documents many more cases that may come up in a document than even OOXML, not to mention ODF."

There have been some technical concerns raised by some nerdy people who wear ass glasses and penis protectors, but the people at ISO cannot understand the 60,000 page documentation, so they are probably going to take Apple's word, and money, for it.

Sources

• ISO announces that they have decided to become irrelevant April 02, 2008