What is to be done?
ISO has in a sense put itself in an awkward position here by
already approving the rival OpenDocument
format as an ISO standard. This makes it harder to reject OOXML, and
at the same time makes it difficult to approve OOXML, since it
competes with an existing ISO standard. Generally, I'm unhappy with
how closely these two standards are tied to existing software. What I
would really have liked to see was for OpenDocument and OOXML both to
be dropped, and the two communities to sit down and work out a common
agreed format that is not tied to any existing software. The Chinese
UOF
format, for example, might have served as the starting point for
this. ODA has
also been suggested. Unfortunately, this requires a political will
that does not seem to be present, and so this seems unlikely for now.
