In the mean time I couldn’t resist commenting on a couple of events that took place this week.

The first came to my attention through a blog post of Doug Mahugh’s, and as you might guess some internal discussion on the topic. The ISO approved text for Open XML (IS29500) has made the status of national standard in the USA.

The INCITS Executive Board has approved the adoption of ISO/IEC IS29500 (Office Open XML) as an American National Standard this week (on April 15), and the document will be published soon by ANSI. 

This action taken by INCITS is a relatively routine occurrence, as the US typically adopts ISO/IEC standards as national standards.  As an INCITS V1 member, I was very excited to see this news.  It’s a positive step in the validation and global adoption of IS29500.

The second I only caught as a tweet from IBM’s Rob Weir, and it was that Ecuador has adopted ODF as a national standard.

This is all goodness and as Doug points out it validates the work that is going on at the moment with document standards in general, making the text of the standard available through the local national body to developers or anybody else in the country that chooses to use it.

It is a significant step for any standards text but while I don’t want to devalue that in any way it is worth looking quickly at what it means to be a national standard.

The full and correct answer differs slightly from geography to geography, but in general it means that the National Standards Body in the country has decided to assign the standard a local catalog number and make the text available as part of their own library.

That’s it, in most cases there is nothing more to it.