As part of his notes on the recent SC34 plenary meeting in Prague Alex Brown has offered a few comments on his views of OpenXML (and in a small part ODF) one year after the ratification of IS29500 by ISO.
The maintenance of OpenXML within ISO appears to be moving forward well.
From Alex’s blog post;
Overall, WG 4 is making excellent progress. To date, 169 defects have been collected for OOXML (check out the defect log) and the majority of these have either been closed, or a resolution agreed. Amendments were started for 3 of the 4 parts of OOXML to allow a bunch of small corrections to be put in place, and the even-more-minor problems will be fixed by publishing technical corrigenda. Overall, I think stakeholders in OOXML can feel pretty confident that the Standard is being sensibly and efficiently maintained.
I was personally very pleased to see National Bodies well-represented (the attendance list is here [tbc]) – to the extent that I’d now ideally like to see some more big vendors coming to the table so their views can be heard. Microsoft (of course) was; but where (for example) are Apple, Oracle and the other vendors who participated in Ecma TC 45 while OOXML was being drafted? To them – and to anybody who wants to get involved in this important work – I say: participate!
Over at Rick Jelliffe’s blog Rick has been carrying out something of an exposé of the unfortunate imbalance in the stakeholders represented in the maintenance of ODF at OASIS (something which will become even more acute if Sun is, in the end, snapped-up by IBM). Personally I think Rick is right that it is vitally important to have a good mix of voices at the standardisation table: big vendors, small vendors, altruistic experts, users, government representatives, etc. WG 4 is getting there, but it too has some way to go.
The international participation in the IS29500 maintenance process appears to be both climbing and broadening beyond the original actors.
Can you expand a bit more on the climbing and broadening part? I just looked at the minutes of the WG4 meeting and whilst I have not done any cross referencing of names and I don’t recognise them all, nobody leaps out at me as being a new actor over and above those at the BRM. I don’t think it helps anyone to have a “who has the broadest committee” contest, but I just don’t understand the assertion that there are new actors on the stage here.