Two years ago today the first entry of this blog was posted. Eighteen years ago today I began a whirlwind romance with the woman who became my wife. It is probably more on account of the latter than the former that we are drinking Champagne tonight. But perhaps now, as the DIS 29500 project draws to a conclusion, a little blogging reminiscence is in order …

DIS 29500: some personal reminiscences

Looking back over two years of blog entries, it is clear that the dominant theme has been the standardisation of OOXML (ISO/IEC 29500). One of the first blog entries reported from the May 2006 Seoul SC 34 plenary, the meeting at which it first became evident trouble was brewing.

I remember the meeting well, how there were so many unfamiliar faces present. It was the first time I met Ecma’s Jan van den Beld and IBM’s Rob Weir (to name but two). I remember how, at the opening plenary Jan gave a presentation about Ecma and spent some time explaining how the name “Ecma” was not an acronym but a brand name, and how its capitalisation was important. SC 34 old-timers shifted uncomfortably in their seats – wasn’t this just the sort of corporate bullshit one came to standards meetings to avoid? I remember how Rick Jelliffe (struggling with the crapware on his new Dell laptop) got tapped angrily on the shoulder when leaving the room and told it was no surprise he was a “Windows user”. I remember how a pleasant conversation over lunch was interrupted by somebody scraping their chair across the floor to join our table and launching into a monologue about how we should be wary of OOXML, as it contained secret metadata fields the FBI used to track people down and shoot them.

Clearly something was up, and the forces of unreason were on the move. It was at that meeting that I resolved to do what I could to resist these forces – a route which led me to become convenor of the DIS 29500 BRM.

Looking back at my first blog entry, my overall reaction to what I wrote is “+1”. A couple of extracts are interesting in the light of subsequent developments:


This one counted against my claim to become BRM convenor. I personally believed the accelerated standardisation process were unsuitable then, and the following two years have merely reinforced that belief. Personally, I look forward to the day they (PAS and Fast Track) are scrapped as part of root-and-branch reform of JTC 1.


In the end, this turned out (I believe) to be a decisive factor in the approval of DIS 29500. Ecma made the road very rocky though, by initially producing a text that was so lousy with faults.


As it turned out, technical experts generally had rather more input into the process than I predicted. However in the light of decisions such as Norway’s this is an interesting anticipation of the fact that generally standards approval is ultimately a bureaucratic process.


Oh yes, for sure! Though there are signs the debate is maturing and that when it comes to document formats people are beginning to realise “it’s just stuff”.

Where is the final DIS 29500 text?

The final DIS 29500 text was meant to be submitted by Ecma, and then distributed to National Bodies by 29 March 2008. Ecma duly submitted a text on time but this text has remained with ITTF. National Bodies are unhappy about this, and at the SC 34 Oslo meeting 12 countries passed a unanimous resolution calling for the release of the text – to no effect.

The description of the Fast Track process in the JTC 1 Directives is generally pretty sketchy, but the closing stages of it are particularly poorly thought-through. Is it really sensible if Ecma’s efforts become, unchecked, the final IS text? Personally, I'd say not, and that an all-important QA stage has been omitted. ITTF are perfectly entitled to make special rulings (as they evidently have done, and not for the first time in this project) on the authority of the Secretaries General of ISO and IEC. It would be more sane, I believe, for them to have invented an FDIS stage for this project and have NBs submit editorial corrections. However I can see that the politics and practicalities of the situation make this difficult – it’s not hard to imagine every fault in the text being screamed about by the anti camp as a reason for halting the entire project.

Ultimately the situation raises questions which go to the heart of the relationship between JTC 1 as an entity, and its member bodies. Just who is in charge, the nations or the officials? The unfortunate state of the Directives have meant there have been too many occasions when officials have had to step in and save the nations from the folly of the Directives that they themselves approved. Like ODF and OOXML the Directives is (literally) a standard, a standard that has faults. Unlike ODF and OOXML, however, I am beginning to believe the Directives have got to a state where they cannot be redeemed by evolution and amendment. It may be time to start again from scratch.