Tim Bray from the Canadian delegation on the ECMA dispositions:
They accompanied each group with an “ECMA Response”; these became the unit of work at the BRM. I thought the Responses were in most cases quite constructive and intelligent. But in aggregate, they comprised a frighteningly-huge mass of changes to a frighteningly-huge document to be applied in a frighteningly-small amount of time.
and how the BRM had to deal with it:
…, most of the thousand Responses didn’t get addressed. And the rules apparently say that if it doesn’t get explicitly voted in, the change doesn’t get made. So there was a gang-vote where everybody could fill in all the Responses they wanted to approve or disapprove, and even put in a default approve/disapprove/abstain clause. …This only applied to the Responses that didn’t get dealt with one way or another at the meeting. Most votes on this were Yes, because whether or not you were 100% satisfied with any given ECMA/Microsoft Response, it was usually an improvement over what had been there before.
Tim Bray finds the ISO fast-track process inappropriate for the large, immature ECMA specification:
The process was complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit. I’m not an ISO expert, but whatever their “Fast Track” process was designed for, it sure wasn’t this. You just can’t revise six thousand pages of deeply complex specification-ware in the time that was provided for the process. That’s true whether you’re talking about the months between the vote and when the Responses were available, the weeks between the Responses’ arrival and the BRM, or the hours in the BRM room.
Further more:
This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen.
About the author:
On his personal web page the XML expert writes about prior problems with Microsoft:
I serve as a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Working Group and have co-edited the XML 1.0 and XML Hyperlinking specifications through their first several drafts, with an interlude of having been temporarily axed under pressure from Microsoft, because of my relationship with Netscape.
He has also a Wikipedia entry.