OOXML Continued

Brazil and India vote NO.

There's an article here:

Quote from the article:
"I was a member of the technical group that have studied OOXML specification extensively. I learned that it is unbelievable how ECMA (same guys that put together the JavaScript standard!) can think that a wannabe spec like OOXML is ready for submission. It is incomplete (does not provide mappings with legacy standards, since compatibility is OOXML goal), too long (6000+ pages), fully tied to a single product, uses deprecated substandards, promotes bad practices (embedded binary objects), has clear proprietary hooks (like “formatAsWord95″ XML tags), reinvents the wheel all around (date and color formats etc), and most of all does not have a standards-grade look and feel required for a universal and (virtually) eternal document format (doesn’t have to be perfect, but can’t be that imperfect)."

I guess these are enough reasons to say NO to OOXML ....

US votes yes (with comments). Germany voted YES

My favourite comment:

I would say that in the voting “yes” countries the ballot has been rigged by the votes Microsoft has bought by stuffing the voting committees with Microsoft partners. This has been observed and well reported.

and

In Brazil and in all other countries that followed a process, a NO is inevitable because of the quality of the OOXML specification, and the technical issues you can extract from it.

This week should have more country results out with the final result being announced in early September.