This morning sees the final meeting of IST/41/-/1, the ad hoc technical committee formed to carry out a technical review of the OpenXML standard and make recommendations to IST/41. This afternoon, IST/41 meets to consider the technical committee’s report and maybe make a recommendation to IST/-/1, which is the body that actually decides how BSI should vote. Well, subject to some other coordinating committee (IST/- ?) which takes into account the views of other parts of the BSI and may have the power to overrule IST/-/1. According to the convenor (or maybe chairman) of IST/41 there have been no changes in the membership of IST/41 or IST/-/1 this year, so if MS or its enemies have been packing UK committees they were prescient enough to do so well in advance!
So which way should the UK vote? Well, in formal terms that is easy. There are 3 possible votes: Yes, No with comments, or abstain. Abstaining is silly, because you are effectively denying yourself a vote. Voting Yes is also wrong, as explained in the previous article.
Why? Well surely everyone, from the most ardent MS-supporter to the most ardent MS-hater would agree that the standard would benefit from correction of a large number of the minor errors identified by the technical committee, the BSI should surely vote No with comments. That way it puts pressure on the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) to address those errors.
Equally, of course, since it is not possible to vote an unconditional No, if BSI wants to achieve that effect it needs to vote “No with comments” and refuse to change its vote at the BRM.
So the real issue boils down to what comments to include. There are basically four types:
(A) umpteen minor errors in the existing standard (some trivial, some less so);
(B) using SVG instead of VML;
(C) using MathML, instead of a non-standard MS variant;
(D) the fact that the standard is in contradiction with the existing ISO/IEC standard for ODF.
It is hard to see why (A) should not be included. Equally, given reasonable cooperation by Ecma and MS, it is hard to see why amending the standard to take account of them would take a particularly long time. In principle, it could even be done within the month allowed by the JTC1 Directives for the Project Editor to do his work.
(B) and (C) are harder. First, of course, there is a point of principle. MS takes the line that since SVG and MathML are not actually ISO/IEC standards they can be ignored. Others take the view that they are widely accepted international standards (both promulgated by W3C), so it is still wrong for OpenXML not to make use of them. MS’s second line of defence is that SVG and MathML are not adequate for Office 2007. The snag there is that they do not appear to have produced any evidence in support of that contention and a bare assertion is not enough.
Suppose IST/41 or IST/-/1 wanted to include SVG and MathML in the comments. Would that amount to an unconditional No vote? In other words, would it be feasible for the BRM to approve the standard subject to it being changed to use SVG and MathML? Well probably not, unless Ecma and MS really pulled a finger out. But it would be possible for the BRM to approve the standard without requiring SVG and MathML, but with some sort of undertaking that the next revision of the standard should use them. So IST/41 and IST/-/1 may want to consider what kind of undertaking in that direction - if any - they would find acceptable.
Finally, we come to (D). That is probably the most contentious issue. The BSI has already put a marker up by “raising a contradiction” on these grounds during the initial 30=-day period. It could now repeat it as part of its “technical reasons to be stated” (to use the words of 9.6 of the JTC1 Directives). Or it could decide to give up on the point.
Since this article is already long, I will deal with this issue in more detail in Part 2 (and also with some other key issues for the two BSI committees).
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