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Ecma Receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Standards

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everyone-has-an-opinion dept.

Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft's Office Open XML document format attracted 3,522 comments from the national standards bodies that participated last summer in balloting that has so far derailed the effort to certify the format as an ISO standard. Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week. Ecma International is a Swiss standards body that already ratified Open XML and is guiding the format through the ISO. According to Jones many of the 3,500-plus comments, consisting mainly of objections and suggested changes to Ecma's standards proposal, overlap with one another. "When you group them into similar buckets, it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list," he said. Still, he apparently acknowledged that the number of comments was "still pretty impressive." Open XML just missed out on a fast-track to approval as an ISO standard in the initial balloting that concluded in early September. Ecma's proposal won a majority of the votes that were cast but not enough to meet the requirements for approval. Ecma has until January 14 to provide responses and rebuttals to the comments submitted by the national standards bodies. The issues raised will then be debated at a so-called ballot resolution meeting that ISO will hold starting February 25, after which the various national standards bodies will have a chance to amend their vote — the last chance for Open XML to be approved."

8 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot comments about the comments by icepick72 · · Score: 4, Funny

    And the ECMA modded most of the 3522 comments between +1 and +3 interesting.

    1. Re:Slashdot comments about the comments by Cassius+Corodes · · Score: 5, Funny

      They were browsing at +2

      --
      Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
    2. Re:Slashdot comments about the comments by nadaou · · Score: 5, Funny

      Where does that leave the 6,500 missing comments?

      Florida

      --
      ~.~
      I'm a peripheral visionary.
  2. World record by burgundysizzle · · Score: 4, Funny

    Perhaps someone can submit it to the Guiness World Records folks? There can't have been too many other standards with as many (or more) comments. It may not end up being a standard, but with a bit of help it can be a really good joke.

  3. Re:Now let's see the reply by pembo13 · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's not fair. They are going to edit it in Office 2007, so the entire layout is going to change.

    --
    "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
  4. Re:Unfortunately by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Funny

    Also, IE refused to render the list in anything but quirks mode, thus making everything off by random numbers of pixels.

  5. Re:cha, as if by pallmall1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now, you're going to think about whether this comment will be marked "funny", or "insightful".
    I heard the Slashdot crew was considering a mod category called "perverse", but they dropped the idea when they couldn't decide whether it should be a plus one or a minus one.
    --
    3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
  6. Re:VMS Doc Set by hdparm · · Score: 4, Funny

    May I ask, what happened to your original /. ID?