A number of sites are reporting that a further set of proposed dispositions have been posted to the Ecma web site for review by the national standards bodies and various technical committees.
Brian Jones, Microsoft’s representative on TC45 within Ecma, mentions on his blog that the committee has now looked at over half of the submitted comments and have constructive responses that talk about how those comments can be addressed.
With this drop of dispositions Ecma have begun to look at the subset of the more complex comments that were raised by the technical review phase of the fast track process, some of these will represent substantial changes to the specification, part of the TC45 status report on Ecma’s site details these suggestions.
You can find the full TC45 status report here, for ease of reading I have copied the text that talks about the specific changes that are being proposed;
Sphere: Related ContentAllowing for ISO-8601 Dates
ECMA-376, the original Open XML standard adopted by Ecma, assigned a unique numeric value to each date in a spreadsheet, in order to improve the speed of date calculations. Based on the comments received from some National Bodies on this issue, DIS 29500 will be updated to allow date values to be stored using the format defined by the ISO 8601 standard.
Internationalized handling of weekdays and weekends
ECMA-376 allowed for a week that begins on Sunday or Monday, but not a week that begins on any other day, such as Saturday. Ecma is proposing a comprehensive range of options for what is defined as the first day of the week, and what is defined as the weekend.
Language tags
ECMA-376 used a set of integer values to identify the language applied to regions of a document. Ecma is proposing that the language tags specified in the DIS should instead leverage an internationally recognized practice for representing languages, IETF BCP 47. IETF BCP 47 is a Best Current Practices document that incorporates use of the ISO 639 standard for languages, ISO 15924 for scripts, and ISO 3166 for regions. This proposal directly follows recommendations from National Bodies in several countries.
Page Borders
ECMA-376 included support for a variety of graphical elements that could be used as page borders. Several National Bodies noted that this closed list of graphical elements was not sufficiently diverse and global in its contents. Based on that feedback, Ecma is proposing to change the Open XML standard to allow for custom page borders. This will enable implementers to determine the best option for including borders relevant to their applications.
Usage of ISO standards for grammars
ECMA-376 used its own notation for defining the grammar for some of the more advanced functionality, such as spreadsheet formulas and word processing fields. Several National Bodies noted that the existing grammars in ECMA-376 are non-standard and were not fully described within the DIS. In response to this concern, Ecma proposes to revise the notation for spreadsheet formulas and fields to use an existing ISO standard. Formula notation will now use ISO/IEC 14977:1996 – Syntactic metalanguage – Extended BNF. This proposal improves the ability for implementers to test and validate conformance to the specification.