The most frustrating thing being the results of this will directly affect me in my professional life (Linux Systems Administrator) as well as my private life but there is very little that seems possible outside of hoping that the UK NB sticks by the No vote and that more NBs see the sense of the matter….

Incidentally over at Brian Jones’ blog there are dispersions being cast over your macro comments and the state of ISO 26300 unsurprisingly.

There were a mix of NB views expressed. I’m not sure the meeting notes give a good flavor of that. For example, some NB’s did not raise any points and just said “We are delighted with DIS 29500″ when it was their turn. Since they did not propose any text changes, their view was not recorded in the resolutions. Similarly, those NB’s who, in the view of the Convenor, had proposals that were not achievable within the time constraints of the BRM, these could not be brought up for discussion. So you won’t see them in the meeting notes or resolutions. The net result is the resolutions are a slice of the more moderate opinions in the room. But the atmosphere was far more charged than these notes would suggest.

Further to my previous comment (and having now read the meeting notes and resolutions accepted) I am of the distinct impression the prevailing attitude seems to have been:

NB1: “Gah this is awful… It should have been done this way in the first place as it is the ‘proper’ way to do it”

NB2:”I agree it would be a ‘better’ spec if we do it that way”

Rest:”Agreed – The editor is instructed to incorporate resolution X”

So the end result is that yes the spec was improved but only to the extent that those who deal with standards creation often feel the original was awful and near enough ‘any’ change had to be an improvement. Thus to deny a resolution would be to leave the text as was and as professionals they felt an obligation to at least get an improved text out – even if the result was the final text still wouldn’t be up to scratch for a standard.

Consequently most of the time at the BRM (including in the evening out of session) seems to have been spent getting it into a shape where it could ‘start’ being discussed as opposed to final polish – this, of course, resulting in no time to actually work on ‘worthwhile’ changes to polish it up and make it worthy of an ISO stamp….

Your comments?

Resolutions of the meeting

Editied notes of the meeting.

Can you say if these link up with your experiances last week?

Thank you for posting this comment about OOXML not documenting macros and its impact on interoperability – especially with MS documents that are free to use MS’ closed and proprietary scripting languages.

I don’t think that’s been brought up anywhere as a natural consequence of the MACROBUTTON comment to the DIS. It certainly opened my eyes.

I agree with your statement that it appears that ISO is making up the rules as it goes along and that nothing would surprise me at this point.

…Well – almost nothing. I think I’d be very surprised of MS/ECMA pulled the DIS from consideration for ISO standardization. — but I don’t think I’d be surprised by anything less….

Some countries seem to be breaking silence where they can about the BRM… hopefully the NBs will get the message the DIS 29500 spec is not ready to be an ISO standard.

Incidentally on groklaw there is a very interesting discussion about the ISO press release. Read one way it sounds like no or abstain votes can be changed to yes but it doesn’t comment on yes to no votes. Any comments on that Rob? AFAIK countries are free to change their vote any way they want for the next 30 days? If a country changes to yes and others don’t realise they can change to no (such as the US) it could still lead to the spec being railroaded through…

ODF does not mandate any particular scripting language. You can mix scripting languages within the same document if you want, though each <script> will need to declare what language it uses.

API is the DOM representation of the document, or is implementation defined.

So we’ve gone far beyond the nothing that OOXML offers on this topic.

Please forgive my laziness for not looking it up myself in ISO 26300 but do you happen to know how macros are defined in that?

Also thanks for the commentry on the BRM last week – it was a very interesting insight especially when combined with other blogs.

I am looking forward to seeing the final votes at the end of the month – and given the US HoD’s comments I hope the US changes it’s position from yes to no!