Thanks a lot for this presentation, that explains very well where we are and what to do/expect next.

For raising awareness among the Romanian users on the OOXML matter, I’ve translated your post, 100%, in Romanian and published for them at http://rsandu.myblog.ro/ .

According to one post made by Mr. Dan Matei, the president of CT210 comitee of ASRO (Romanian NB), ASRO won’t send a delegation to Geneva. Given the big financial interests of the Microsoft partners in Romania, I have no naive ilussion that Romania will change its YES vote for OOXML – despite the fact a big scandal has grown up…

Regards,
Răzvan

How does this fact reflects on OOXML ? Besides the fact that they can not be considered “independent” as far as OOXML is involved they also decided to forgo standards XML-tools for the platform (Mac supports XML just fine – but not the kind used in OOXML) and went with foreign objects injected in otherwise native application.

Looks like Microsoft may start pushing OOXML as a “security fix” of sorts?

Unless there’s an Excel 2007 format that doesn’t use OOXML or something.

All BRM participants will need to be on a NB delegation, and NB’s are required to submit the names of the delegates well in advance of the meeting. For example, in the US we know that we are allowed to have 6 delegates, and these will be chosen later this week. That said, we probably have 10 people on our committee who would like to attend. So in practice the “excess” people are turned away at this point rather than in Geneva.

Isn’t there any way to avoid the trouble ahead of time?

@Nobody, they are claiming a room limitation of 120. But once the potential size of the meeting increased past 20 or so people, it ceases to be a “meeting” and starts to become more like a parliamentary body. At that point it is less about individual expertise and more about representation and rules of order, IMHO. So long as every country that wants to attend can send a delegation, I have no complaints about the 120 person limit. It is not like a BRM of 200 or 500 people would be any more or less effective.

@Anonymous, you make some good points. Creating an ISO Standard is a long, rigorous, technically-demanding process. Or at least that is the way it used to be. But now we have mechanisms that allow fast track conversions of existing standards from other standards bodies. Abuse of fast track is what this about. I don’t think we need to throw out ISO, but we certainly need to reform JTC1’s fast track procedures.

The same is even more true for OOXML…Microsoft office does not perfectly support the OOXML version submitted to ECMA. Even worse, Microsoft, that by all means should know their own format, has been unable to produce OOXML support for MAC. This speaks volumes about how broken OOXML is.

>Of the four suites that supposedly support it well, three are essentially badge-engineered. They’re same! (OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and NeoOffice.)

How would that matter? Two independant Office suits that support ODF is more than one, right? The number of supporting suits are most certainly not changed by that one of them has been forked into three suits.

Also please compare this to Microsoft that has been unable to get even partial support for OOXML on Mac.

>Most of the remaining programs that “support” ODF do so because it’s trivial to do so (e.g., search only has to index, not render, edit, or output.)

Sure that you are not talking about those other programs that Microsoft claim “support” OOXML , but that in reality only support limited functionality?

(and do so by using Microsoft dll:s that parse the data)

Then it could backfire if THEIR people get turned away because the meeting is over-capacity.

OTOH, I bet they’d try and turn the blame around on that one, as if you chose the small hall…

Ring-side seats at the BRM would sell for a good price!