Portugal will decide this Monday how it will vote on Microsoft's electronic document format, Office Open XML (OOXML) in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
ISO decided to consider OOXML last February. It will decide whether to accept the standard this September, in a vote by standard bodies from more than a hundred countries.
In Portugal decisions on IT standards like these are delegated to the the experts at the Institute for Computer Science by the Portuguese Institute of Quality (Instituto Português de Qualidade).
The OOXML proposal is controversial. IT companies, IT standard experts and Open Source groups have raised many technical objections. They point to internal inconsistencies, raise doubts on the application independence and state the specification conflicts with the existing ISO standard for electronic documents, Open Document Format (ODF) and other ISO standards.
"One of the two ISO standards will cannibalise the other, sooner or later", says Open Source developer Vitor Domingos in an interview with Sapo.pt, a Portuguese Internet provider. Domingos helps to develop Open Office, an Open Source suite of office applications that uses ODF. He refers to OOXML as a standard controlled by a company, and ODF a standard submitted by the community. "OOXML complicates its adoption being six thousand pages long."
Microsoft representatives around the world have defended the OOXML ISO-proposal, saying its industry customers have asked for its development and that the standard already has the support of many companies and software developers. Also, OOXML and ODF are not the only standards that co-exist, says Marcos Santos, Microsoft's Portuguese platform strategist, in the same Sapo interview.
Standard bodies in other European member states are also deciding on their opinion on OOXML. In the Netherlands, for example, a decision is expected by mid-August.
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