Third meeting about OOXML proposal at ČNI
There was (hopefully) the last meeting about OOXML proposal
at
Czech Standards Institute today.
Seven people joined the meeting - two from Microsoft, one from IBM,
one from CompTIA, one from ČNI, Jirka Kosek as an editor of Czech
proposal and me. This meeting was the most constructive from the
series of meetings about this proposal. There was not only interesting
and constructive technical discussion about the proposal itself, but
also some fun (Jirka and me like Emacs, and one of Microsoft employees
likes vi ;-).
The agenda was simple: walk over rejected and accepted comments and
agree on final comments. I have to say "Thank you" to all people
there, because we were able to constructively agree (or change) on all
comments and we only rejected one "would be nice, but..." comment from
Jirka. Other comments were accepted and we even find some other
discrepancies in the proposal (one of the favourite was mine comment
about ST_LangCode which was understood wrongly by Jirka and rewritten
into yet another valid comment about the same element whose
description's first sentence contains two mistakes - I noticed the
first and Jirka the second. I was not able to spot the Jirka's bug,
because I know that MS LCID for en-US is 1033 decimal, thus I read
"Here is the list of hexadecimal values: 1033, ..." as "Here is the
list of numbers: 1033, ..." But anyway, two digit hex number can't
store 1033 anyway, basic maths... 8).
The good atmosphere was destroyed by Petr Wallenfels (not his fault
though) from ČNI who has shown us several (approx. 30) letters from
Microsoft partners and customers. They have all almost the same
contents "We would like ČNI to accept this proposal, because
...". There was no negative letter. Fortunately this is not how ČNI
works. The complete process was transparent and only technical
comments were allowed. Looks like all writers were victims of some
business politics around OOXML. This was the only sad point in the
meeting. It was poor from the person/company who organized this.
Yes, OOXML standard is bad. It is seriously broken in several aspects
that these people are not able to judge by themselves, thus it has no
sense to take care about such comments. They missed the chance to make
it better. And they like it - they all wrote it in their
letters...
Lunch at KFC with Jirka and Michael J. from Microsoft. Interesting
discussions.