DIN e.V., the German standards institute, has now posted the results of the meeting August 21 by the technical committee. It's a "yes" (or "yes, comments") decision on Microsoft's submission of OOXML as a proposed standard. It's in German, naturally. A volunteer, RA Schinagl, who is a lawyer in Germany, has provided an English translation, so we can have a more accurate picture of what the vote was, even if we can't read German. Update: There is now the DIN statement in English.
Here is the translation:
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Germany will support the acceptance of the Office Open XML as an
ISO-standard – but with quite a few suggestions for improvement.
(2007-08-22)
The process of the international standardization provides that at a national
level the formation of opinion about standards projects shall happen in so-called mirror boards. Thus it happens in the case of the fast track
procedure for the implementation of the ECMA-376 "Office Open XML“ standard
as ISO-standard, ISO/IEC 29500 which was initiated by the ECMA.
All 103 full members of the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) may ballot by 2 September 2007 about this – one vote per country.
The ECMA-376 standard published in December 2006 documents on 6000 pages the
XML-format for office application which was originally developed by
Microsoft.
It is the second of such formats that has been proposed at an international
level.
The "Open Document Format“, the OASIS-consortium (Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards) looks after was already
published as ISO/IEC 26300 "IT –Open Document Format for Office Applications
(OpenDocument)“.
The board in charge of the standards committee IT and applications (NIA) at
the DIN e.V. has held a meeting on 21 august 2007 in Berlin after months of
intensive preparatory work on the topic of the Office Open XML.
Representatives of software suppliers, application developers, scientific
institutes, ministries and administrations attended.
Following an extensive and constructive discussion of the statements
received the board decided to accept the draft of the ISO/IEC 29500 with
comments.
Regarding the large extent of the document the German comments on the
technical improvement of the ECMA-standard sum up to several dozens of
pages. Those proposals for the technical improvements will be delivered to
the ISO.
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