Your thriller for the summer - OOXML standardisation
You are missing the suspense of your favorite TV series over the summer ? Follow the episodes of OOXML Standardisation, that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
As you might remember, OOXML is Microsoft’s Open Office XML- a XML-based standard which has been proposed as a standard for the electronic document and competes with OpenDocument. After a standardisation by ECMA International, OOXML is now thriving for ISO standardisation.
Almost every single day, a new “episode” episode comes up:
- The US ended up adopting it after a change in position. Initially, the INCITS (INternational Committee for Information Technology Standards) had advised against OOXML (8 yes, 7 No, 1 Abstain, requiring 2/3 majority); but after a 30-day deliberation, a number of voters, among which the DoD changed their position, eventually providing strong support to OOXML (12 Yes out of 16).
- Three days ago, Brazil voted against OOXML.
- China is voting negatively, claiming they did not want a standardised format coming from a single company.
- A few days ago, it was India’s turn to vote negatively, invoking a list of technical problems to be solved before it could become a standard.
- Sweden’s case was quite interesting too - it apparently changed radically from negative to positive after a number of companies joined the Swedish Standardisation Institution just for the vote.
Other countries have voted positively (e.g. Germany) or negatively (e.g. Spain), or are due to give a final vote by September 2nd (e.g. France).
There is an awful lot of passion around this standardisation effort, probably too much. I won’t take a stance, as I have neither gone through the 6000 pages of Microsoft’s ECMA proposal nor ODF’s standard.
Whatever the outcome though, there is a strong need for an XML-based representation of documents, and once the dust settles, this effort should be beneficial for all of us.
