I ask the national members of ISO to vote “NO” to the ballot on the Microsoft Office OpenXML (OOXML) specification to become an ISO standard for the following reasons:
- There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds cost to industry, government and citizens;
- There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
- There is missing information from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
- More the 10% of the examples mentioned in the standard do not validate XML conformity;
- There is no garantee that anybody can write a software that fully implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent damages or patent license fees;
- This standard conflicts with other ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 …
