In New Zealand the SNZ is responsible for the resolution of the comments. One of the most important comments filed by New Zealand is the human readability of the Open XML format. I matters a lot because ECMA won't resolve it.
Human Readability of XML
There was a comparison of <cell> vs <c> in spreadsheets and which was faster. The goals of XML say, "6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear. 10.Terseness in XML mark-up is of minimal importance." — http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-origin-goals This DIS contradicts the goals of XML and best practices. The designers of XML knew what they were doing because while we can remember what "c" means in this case it becomes problematic when we get hundreds or thousands of these shorthand references. HTML, the web page language, has some shorthand references like this but then there are only around 20 things to memorize, so in practice it's not a problem. OOXML has hundreds of these cryptic names.
"Analogous wording shall be used to express analogous provisions; identical wording shall be used to express identical provisions.
This is what New Zealand proposed:
This DIS should be changed to follow the goals and best practices of XML by using human-legible terms and distinct terminology as required.
It sounds to me like a 500 pages patch of trivial changes. Someone needs to work on that comment. We should make up our mind how it can be done. If you are interested to help to resolve that comment just sent an email to us at noooxml at ffii dot org. We would appreciate your ideas on how to get it done.
