The OOXML News

I was really wrong about the OOXML/ISO story; told everyone “It’ll sail through ISO, don’t bother with the process.” Boy, was I wrong. At the moment that process is hurtling toward the mildly-historic “Ballot Resolution Meeting” in Geneva in February (read about it here and here). Anyhow, all those tens of thousands of comments on the first draft, which were previously invisible behind some ISO veil, are now out there for all to view, tag, hyperlink, annotate, and enhance, at the unofficial but excellent DIS29500 Comments site (tagline: “Help the OOXML BRM concentrate on issues of substance”). The person behind it seems to be Alan Bell, whom I don’t think I know, but the world owes him a vote of thanks. Obviously, this whole thing does retain a grimy side; see the excellent Martin Bryan’s fairly-despondent Report on WG1 activity for December 2007 Meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG1 in Kyoto. Sigh. Nobody ever said history was clean.