It appears that the ongoing saga of the international standardization of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) standard has come to an end, with OOXML victorious. In a release today ISO and IEC announced the joint decision to push forward with publication of the OOXML standard as revised “after appeals by four national standards bodies against the approval of the document failed to garner sufficient support.” The national standards bodies of of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela had submitted appeals against the fast track standardization process last spring following a contentious commenting period on the initial draft. It will be some time before the standard version of OOXML is in use in MS Office, because the standard had been revised in response to the several thousand comments that were received during the balloting.
