ANSI has received the email below submitting a comment on a matter presently out for consideration by the US TAG for JTC 1.

 

As Administrator of the US TAG, please pass along this comment for their consideration in developing the US position on the question of a Fast Track Ballot for ECMA-376¦ ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Office Open XML File Formats.

 

Thanks

Henrietta

 

Henrietta Scully

Program Manager

Standards Facilitation

hscully@abnsi.org

 

 

 

I would like to voice my concern about the OpenXML standard.  Even though OOXML is over 6000 pages, it is incomplete.  In particular, it leaves a number of tags undocumented (autoSpaceLikeWord95, mwSmallCaps), fails to define important concepts (Word 95 Full Width Character Spacing", "Word 97 Text Wrapping Around Floating Objects"), and mandates proprietary technology (Windows Metafile).

As written, it is more a convention than a standard.  It does not yet merit the ISO label.  Please take the time to ensure that OOXML's loose ends are cleaned up before accepting it into your canon.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Scott Bronson
San Francisco
415 519 8484