Norbert Bollow's Comments on Standards
2009-11-11: No substantial agreement yet on OOXML DCORs
Here's a quick update on the results of the DCOR1 (draft corrigendum 1) ballots for ISO/IEC 29500 have been distributed to the ISO/IEC member bodies last week.
Two national bodies (Brazil and Malaysia) have voted DISAPPROVE, while a number of further national bodies have submitted comments which express serious concerns, for example about interoperability problems resulting from the reintroduction of the serial value date and time format into the Transitional storage format.
As a careful study if the JTC1 directives shows, it is up to the SC34 secretariat to decide whether there is sufficient agreement about the substance of the changes.
In the present case, the SC34 secretariat has decided that that is not the case, and has sent the ballot result with the comments to the working group (SC34 WG4) "for comment resolution and recommendation of further action". In other words, the DCOR1 ballots have failed to get the necessary level of approval, and it's now up to WG4 to make a new suggestion if they so choose (which they certainly will), which will them be balloted again.
There is nothing unusual or sinister about this, it's a normal consensus-seeking process.
This process is slower than many people would have liked. I am getting the impression though that many of people who are impatient now are among those who have strongly insisted back in March 2008 that the specification of OOXML as modified at the BRM should absolutely be approved as an international standard. Well, you can't have both: If you want it to be an international standard, it's not going to be very easy to change it. Generally I would recommend to insist on a careful review and problem-fixing process before approving a specification as an international standard.
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