The ECMA Technical Committee 45, continues to comment the comments received during the Office Open XML ISO fast-track procedure and have now reached to two thirds of them. The response to comments are only sent to the national bodies

The last set of proposed changes contains one major interesting thing; OOXML, or DIS 29500, is proposed to be a multi-part standard, which some national bodies suggested. The parts are:

  • DIS 29500-1: WordProcessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML and SharedML specifications
  • DIS 29500-2: is the Open Packaging Convention, OPC
  • DIS 29500-3: the extensibility specification

This is not a big shocker, I imagined it coming, but anyway I’m glad they made the change(proposition to change). Having the OPC in a separate specification is great! Imagine now how we can use this separate standard for packaging other types of information.

Having OPC in a separate standard will also have impact on the XPS standardization, I guess that ECMA will produce an updated specification of XPS, referring to DIS 29500-2, when submitting XPS to ISO/JTC1 (if OOXML goes through the BRM next year).

Head over the the ECMA press release and read about the other interesting proposed changes to DIS 29500, such as VML removal from the main specification (read the discussions about this in one of my previous posts).

If I don’t get time to make another post until next year I wish you all a great New Year…