There's a bit of a bruhaha around the fast tracking of Office Open XML at the moment ECMA 376 as an ISO standard. New Zealand have, thus far, shown themselves to be among the less supportive crowd.

To be honest it seems to be distilling down to a debate between the:

“There should be one standard” crowd vs the “There can be many standards crowd”.

Rick Jeliffe from Australia (Writing on the O'Reilly site about the Australian standards meeting yesterday) makes a great point:

“Then a quick mention of some of the issues that I prototype in this blog: that ISO standards for documents are voluntary, that standards form a library of choices, that the mere existence of alternative standards does not prevent any group from choosing one over the other, that standards such as PDF and Torx are not open in the sense of allowing arbitrary change but nevertheless valuable, and so on. I emphasized again that the ISO process is a win/win system in which attempts by one group to stymie another’s needs does not fit. “

It makes fascinating reading actually- international techno-politics writ large.

Further to my thoughts earlier this week Rick also points to some thoughts from Marcus Carr:

“Marcus Carr objected to this. He spoke from the perspective of document processing from the early 90s, and the difficulties in practice of dealing with Word documents (with the various hijinks: converting .DOC to the Rainbow DTD, converting .DOC to RTF then processing that, etc) and brought up the key processing issue that I think almost all the commentators on Open XML miss. He brought up the issue of the need for a full-fidelity baseline schema to allow the most flexibility in downstream processing. “