Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Germany / DIN votes "yes with comments"
As can be read in this German press release just issued by DIN (the German national standard body), the German SC34 mirror committee voted "yes with comments" as part of the ISO standardization process of Microsoft Office Open XML. Unfortunately, due to the DIN rules I'm not allowed to disclose details about the discussions (which I personally believe is strange for a standards organization in a democratic country, because the German citizens can't easily find out and follow how the standards are being defined and approved that ultimately might affect how their tax money will be spent or what standards and standard implementations they have to use). Nevertheless, the press release by DIN includes a piece of important information, i.e. that dozens of pages of technical improvement suggestions had been generated. However, the vote resulted in a "yes with comments" which means that the technical comments can be ignored. A "no with comments" which is suggested by ISO for "conditional approvals" did not win the vote.
( Aug 22 2007, 02:59:50 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Kommentare:

Erwin...

Do you know why DIN didn't insist in his "original" request?, ie:

"The German NB prefers to have a harmonized Standards over having two Standards serving basically the same user requirements.
The German NB therefore requests that JTC1 should, before commencing the five-month ballot period,
. Request a list of functionalities potentially missing in ISO/IEC 26300 to ensure backward compatibility with Microsoft’s previous binary office formats.
. Let OASIS as developer of ISO/IEC 26300 analyse if this standard can reasonably be enhanced such that backward compatibility requirements will be met.
Only if such analysis comes to a negative result, processing of DIS 29500 should be continued."

Thank you

Carlos

[1]http://jtc1sc32.org/doc/recent/JTC001-N-8530.zip ( file J1N8530-7_Germany.pdf )

Gesendet von carlos am August 22, 2007 at 03:16 PM CEST #