US national body votes NO to Open XML
The executive committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) fell one vote shy of the nine required to approve Microsoft’s Open XML standard. It voted 8 to 7 in favor of approval with one abstention, the group announced last week.
The ballot description here: Open XML ballot
The voting details here: Open XML US voting
It’s unfortunate that some companies didn’t add comments to their votes. I would be interested to know the reasons for Apple and Intel voting yes, being that they are not strongly affiliated with Microsoft.
Another topic that can lead to some discussion is the fact that the two government agencies present in the group had different votes. the DHS thinks that the existence of 2 standards is a good thing, while the Department of Defense did their homework and based their negative vote on the following technical issues with Open XML:
From the several government agencies present in the voting body, it is interesting to see the different voting positions. The Department of Defense clearly identified the technical reasons for their negative vote:
- Binary information in the standard that would lead to security concerns.
- The referencing of unexplained backward compatibility modes that might pose a problem for third party implementers.
- The use of proprietary file formats within the open standard appear to cause potential intellectual property ownership concerns.
The Department of Homeland Security voted yes, even though they also found technical issues with the proposed standard:
The XML naming and design practices of OOXML, for example, are inconsistent with Federal practices detailed in the Federal XML Community-of-Practice’s Federal XML Naming and Design Rules and Guidelines which prescribes best practices such as ISO/IEC 11179-5 element naming rules; OOXML uses a proprietary naming scheme.
Although this is a though result to Microsoft, I do think that eventually Open XML will be considered a standard format. Microsoft may have to do some work on addressing some technical issues like the ones pointed by DD, but eventually they will get the majority of votes. They just need one vote, and most of the NO votes were “conditional approvals”, voted as NO per the voting guidelines. I’m sure they will try to do some lobbying as a mean to get the missing vote.
Source: pcworld.com
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