There is another issue to consider: the re-use of existing standards. Another part of general standards lore is that one should not constantly reinvent the wheel. So if documents can involve maths, and there is an existing standard for representing maths, then you should re-use that, not re-invent your own variant of it. There are two obvious cases where this applies to OpenXML: maths and graphics.
The existing standard for maths is MathML, established by W3C (the body established by Tim Berners-Lee which has been heavily involved in web and other standards). Microsoft claims this is inadequate for its purposes and it has to use its own variant (which takes about 120 pages to describe). So far it has failed to come up with any justification for this. It is the usual “Trust me, I’m a convicted monopolist”.
For graphics the story is more complicated and I am not sure I properly understand it. MS devised VML many years ago for vector graphics. It was later superseded by SVG, another W3C standard. In OpenXML Microsoft use VML and the newly devised DrawingML but not SVG. It seems fairly clear that VML should be dropped and possibly DrawingML as well. Again, there is no serious justification by Microsoft, just the usual bare assertions.
To an extent these issues interact with the fast-track issue. If this draft was being considered in the usual way, then it would be possible for the appropriate JTC1 committee to go into the issues carefully, and discuss in detail the need to depart from the existing standards. But with the fast-track process there is no room for careful technical discussion.
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