Ecma Int'l Approves Office Open XML Standard
December 15, 2006 // Published as a news service by IHS
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Ecma International approved Microsoft Office Open Extensible Markup Language (XML) (Open XML) as Ecma standard 376 at the General Assembly meeting.
The General Assembly also approved submitting the standard for adoption under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) JTC 1 process.
The work to standardize Open XML was carried out by Ecma International as part of an open, cross-industry collaboration via technical committee 45 (Ecma TC45), which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the U.S. Library of Congress.
With more organizations around the world interested in achieving document processing interoperability and creating digital archives using open formats, the Open XML formats provide an international open standard for word processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets that can be freely implemented across multiple applications and platforms, said Ecma International.
Multiple vendors such as Corel, Microsoft and Novell announced implementations of the Open XML standard in applications such as WordPerfect, Open Office and Microsoft Office 2007.
After more than a year of work, Ecma TC45 produced the Open XML formats to be interoperable by design and produced more than 6,000 pages of documentation on the formats to provide developers all the technical details needed to ensure predictable results and high fidelity interoperability when working with the standard.
Because of the depth of the technical resources Ecma TC45 created, the Open XML standard covers the full set of features used in the existing corpus of billions of documents, said Ecma.
The Open XML standard addresses the international language needs of organizations by supporting all the major worldwide languages and also includes information for assistive technology products to properly process documents, said Ecma International.
Developers have the flexibility to decide whether they want to take advantage of subsets or the full feature set of the Open XML formats. In addition, the format enables organizations to integrate productivity applications with information systems that manage business processes by enabling the use of custom schemas within Open XML documents.
"The broad spectrum of sponsors from the industry and public institutions ensure the creation of an open standard that can create a wide range of possibilities for document processing, archival and interoperability" said Jan van den Beld, secretary general of Ecma International. "The Open XML standard recognizes the benefit of backward compatibility preservation of the billions of documents that have already been created while enabling new future applications of document technology."
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Ecma TC45 will continue to be responsible for the ongoing maintenance of the standard and for enhancing the standard with new and innovative features while simultaneously preserving backwards compatibility, said Ecma International. In January, Ecma International will also begin the fast track process for adoption of the Open XML formats as an ISO international standard under the ISO/IEC JTC 1 process.
Source: Ecma International.