Ecma Receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Standards

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."

Comments

Re:Or it could just die.

[Hal_Porter]

Why did Microsoft feel the need to invent, push, and strongarm OOXML when ODF already exists? Because ODF doesn't support all the legacy Office-isms like linebreaksLikeWord97. Presumably in a DOC file there is this flag. So if you want to save it as XML and then convert it back this information needs to be stored in the file somehow. Would you rather they keep the file format closed? Or maybe they should just stop supporting the 90+% percent of the population that use MS Office and have a bunch of old files and then go bankrupt.

Re:More people wasting their time ...

[jdub!]

No, the major problem here is that fantastic Free Software contributors such as Jody -- who have infinitely more experience and credibility to make judgements about these formats than pretty much all of the noisy advocates -- are spending more time arguing with bigots on both sides of the debate than actually writing Free Software.