As found on
http://avi.alkalay.net/2007/08/ooxml-brazil-says-no.html
Brazil will fill the ISO form with a NO and will attach the 63+2 technical comments to it.
Strong criticism of ECMA continues:
I was a member of the technical group that have studied OOXML specification extensively. I learned that it is unbelievable how ECMA … can think that a wannabe spec like OOXML is ready for submission. It is incomplete (does not provide mappings with legacy standards, since compatibility is OOXML goal), too long (6000+ pages), fully tied to a single product, uses deprecated substandards, promotes bad practices (embedded binary objects), has clear proprietary hooks (like “formatAsWord95″ XML tags), reinvents the wheel all around (date and color formats etc), and most of all does not have a standards-grade look and feel required for a universal and (virtually) eternal document format (doesn’t have to be perfect, but can’t be that imperfect).
Mapping with Legacy Standards
A very interesting argument! Compare page xii of the Part1 of the OOXML specifications which mentions the following:
The goal is to enable the implementation of the Office Open XML formats by the widest set of tools and platforms, fostering interoperability across office productivity applications and line-of-business systems, as well as to support and strengthen document archival and preservation, all in a way that is fully compatible with the large existing investments in Microsoft Office documents.
ECMA's justification for a second similar ISO standard is that Open XML maps existing document format features or is "backwards compatible"1 Although the assert was repeated by ECMA and Microsoft several times no mapping of features was provided. No examples were given how ISO 26300:2006 (or future versions) fail to provide that mapping functionality and which precise features it lacks that cannot be added.
