Microsoft acknowledged OOXML problems

On 15 June, at one of the first meetings of the SiS OOXML working group, presentations were held about ODF and OOXML, respectively. (The OOXML one was one of those "black is white" shows - after seeing it you'd be tempted to believe that all the problems were a good thing.)

Anyhow, Microsoft was present and a consensus was reached that ODF and OOXML are in conflict! (I didn't participate in the particular meeting, but I learned this later.)

I was also told that Stephen McGibbon from Microsoft had mentioned that the EMF / WMF issue is going to be corrected. An e-mail I received from him confirms that he "told the SIS meeting that this is an error in the specification that will be corrected at the BRM, and that Open XML has no requirement on EMF or WMF".

So he acknowledges that this technical problem (though I wouldn't be surprised to see a denial of this categorization) needs fixing. Therefore, we must vote NO, right?

Well, SiS had apparently (un-)done some homework in time for the vote, because they then - despite criticism - no longer seemed to support the earlier assessment that technical problems must be dealt with in order to vote YES (which is how I read the JTC1 directives, section 9.8)...

Now, with 170+ comments, one would think Microsoft would have some counter-arguments, no? Well, I talked about many of the comments on 14 August, with Microsoft present. The working group was given an answer to one or two, the rest Microsoft would answer "via e-mail". Interestingly, on 16 August the same representative pointed to a stack of paper, claiming he'd been working for (only) two days with it, answering all the comments. He didn't want to share them at that time, but said he would "consider" it later.

That was the last I heard about it, until 27 August. Apparently the response had been available since 24 August on LiveLink, a SiS / ISO system for communicating documents, but the working group was not notified (this 3-day gap is not the interesting part, though). One could wonder why he didn't send the information 8 days earlier, when clearly he could do so.

On 27 August, he claimed that "final edits" had been necessary before sharing it, and (since I even asked why they didn't send a draft) I can only conclude that - according to Microsoft - a preliminary response was somehow impossible or of low value to the working group. If this is indeed their opinion, I agree wholeheartedly. They had nothing to say about most comments except "it's wrong", just like in Norway where they hijacked the decision with no actual comments. (Update 3rd September: Norway finally voted no with comments.)