Valium: Broken Standards for all of us
To the FOSS fdi mailing list compTIA's Michael Mudd contributed as follows:
ISO standards are not designed to create a single, unified standard for a given functionality. They're designed to document, and allow others to implement, a given functionality. There are already many ISO standard document file formats, including several flavours of PDF, XML, SGML, and quite a few earlier ones. In all cases there were technical questions that had to be resolved after ISO ratification, be it the PDF/A perceived conflicts with TIFF or most recently ODF.
We at CompTIA support all formal widely used standards, in the document space, both older ISO standards such as PDF/A and now ODF and OOXML as competition spurs innovation.
Valium
- multiple standards are fine, esp. when you already provide an international standard that is fully open.
- multiple standards promote competition and choice
- hundreds of technical comments in fast-track are business as usual.
- ODF gets further developed, so ISO 26300:2006 was not perfect either.
- Odf is old, Open XML is something new.