Ex-ECMA Chief Expects Open XML Approval by March 2007

With ISO's September 2, 2007 voting deadline looming, the recently
retired secretary general of ECMA International defended Microsoft's
Office Open XML document format against fierce technical criticism.
ECMA is shepherding Open XML, the default format used by Office 2007
documents, through ISO's traditionally difficult approval process. The
international standards group has set a Sept. 2 deadline for the 20
nations that are members of the ISO Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC-1)
to vote on whether to approve Open XML. Van Den Beld, who oversaw
ECMA's approval of 229 technical standards, many of which were later
approved by ISO, also predicts that Open XML will be approved next
spring after a follow-up ISO meeting. "Ultimately, I think it will get
through," he said. That's no sure thing, however. The document format
faces strong opposition from grassroots advocates who want to see free
productivity software such as that of OpenOffice.org gain a foothold,
as well as from vendors such as IBM. Opponents argue that Open XML is
redundant in light of the technically similar Open Document Format for
Office Applications (known as ODF) which is native to OpenOffice.org
and was approved as a standard more than a year ago by ISO. A
Netherlands native who served as an executive with Philips Electronics
before joining ECMA in the mid-1980s, Van Den Beld said that if Open
XML is approved, it would not be the first time that two technically
similar formats have become standards. As an example, he pointed to
the multiple DVD recording formats -- including DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM,
and DVD+RW -- that were all approved first by ECMA and then ISO.
"People believe a standards body has complete control over this. That
is completely exaggerated," Van Den Beld said. "You cannot take a
position such as 'Sony, I like you better than Toshiba.' As soon as
you do that, you are no longer neutral." Multiple, similar standards,
while "not a good result, are, because of patent wars, often an
inevitable result," he said. Merging Open XML and ODF is also not the
solution, Van Den Beld said. "The structure of Open XML is so different
from ODF, I don't see how we can bring them together into one standard,"
he said. Regarding objections to the Open XML application because of
its length, Van Den Beld said that when Sun Microsystems submitted
the Java programming language to ECMA in 1999, the application --
which was eventually withdrawn -- was more than 8,000 pages long.