OOXML is now an official standard, which means it has been accepted by the standards organization. However, at least 3 of its members still disagree. Brazil, India and South Africa have registered their complaints and protest the OOXML’s recognition as an international standard.
Some countries, like India, have opposed OOXML from the beginning. However, these appeals after the approval seem to be more about the way the decision was taken, and hence should be seen in a different light. ISO has itself received a lot of criticism for the secrecy in its process, to an extent that some are discussing the OpenISO. Unfortunately, as Andy Updegrove explains, the even here the path ahead is ambiguous. At the least ISO can make the appeals and their considerations public so that the users get to know what happened.
Along side, Microsoft has gone ahead and declared support for ODF in MS Office to back up its interoperability promise. This is a good development and we need to work towards fostering co-evolution of ODF and OOXML, if they are to exist together.
The basic purpose of existence of standards and organizations and processes is to make it convenient for the users. And I personally think that transparency in the processes can help here a lot.
August 17th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
[...] go ahead for OOXML to be published as a standard, refered to as ISO/IEC DIS 29500. There were some appeals against OOXML, however they have been rejected by the standards bodies. Andy Updegrove has the voting results and [...]