Wednesday 18 July 2007, the technical sub-committee of the South African Bureau of Standards recommended that South Africa should vote that OOXML, the XML document formatting standard devised by Microsoft, shouldn’t be accepted by the ISO committee, JTC1, as an XML open document format in September.
What does all that jargon mean?
A common, open document format is important, because it means that different applications, can handle the same data.
A standard for XML document formatting was developed by the software community a number of years ago, that standard is Open Document Format (ODF). ODF was accepted as a standard by ISO (the international Standards Organisation) some time ago.
Microsoft developed another standard for XML document formatting, which they called OOXML. That standard is being considered in the fast track process of the ISO, and South Africa must vote in September whether the standard should be accepted as an additional standard.
The role of the technical sub-committee is to make a recommendation. The sub-committee decided to recommend that the standard be rejected by 13 votes to 4. The subcommittee will give technical reasons for their decision within three weeks.
