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OOXML Denied INCITS V1 Approval
Xenographic writes "INCITS V1, the US group responsible for the US vote over whether or not ANSI will grant fast-track approval to Microsoft's OOXML format, failed to reach the 2/3 consensus required to recommend OOXML to ANSI. What makes this vote interesting is the graph in the article, showing all the new Microsoft business partners who joined INCITS just this year to vote for OOXML. The INCITS Executive Board will now deliberate further, until they can come to some agreement on what to recommend to ANSI, but it's pretty clear that Microsoft is pushing OOXML as hard as it can."
Sometimes I wonder whether Microsoft can implement the standard either. I suspect that the reason they say "like Word 95 does" is that they have a functional code base that works that way, and they couldn't possibly tell you the details of *how* it works (if you've worked at large enough software company this will sound familiar). This of course isn't particularly useful when writing a standard, and if MS wants acceptance they should damn well reverse engineer Word 95 themselves and publish the results.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Does anybody else find it really confusing that MS calls it OOXML. To me, OOXML would mean OpenOffice XML, but then I have to remember that it's ODF, which is the Open Document Format, because it's not specific to OpenOffice. Does anybody think that Microsoft gave it this name specifically to confuse people who would see the acronym and think of OpenOffice?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.