OOXML gets a fix in Geneva and other news of the weird (Links)

That’s right, OOXML actually got a little bit better in Geneva. Not slimmer, not faster, not anymore standards compliant nor open. No. It just got weirder. See what one delegate from Brazil has to say about it. Now, there is even weirder : New rules seemed to have been written on the fly during the BRM. Rob Weir has the story. At this point, it is fairly delicate to draw any conclusion from it aside that normal rules were not followed properly. As a side note, I can’t help noticing that all these efforts seem to have been made by ISO/IEC employees who were trying to do their best to process the whole train of answers and comments on OOXML, which was utterly impossible. That’s quite disturbing but it can be explained by the inherent nature of the fast-track process that implies that the specification at hand was already clean and of good quality, and that’s obviously not the case with OOXML.  The problem is, that it led to the grotesque and forced approval of “99,6 %” of the issues of the answers of the Ecma onOOXML. That’s completely wrong, because the Ecma ignored many points ever since the beginning and the issues were not even discussed during the BRM. If you want to know more about those rules and the uncertainties, read this forum. But perhaps this tops all the rest. The EU Commission is now investigating OOXML and is concerned with anti-competitive practices that have resulted from the standards process and could happen in the case of a standardization. Of course, it does happen with any truly open standards every day. I think it will be the second time that Microsoft gets into legal trouble in less than 10 days, so I thought I would design something weird to celebrate -so to speak- these news. Enjoy!