National Archives of Australia

Of all the national bodies taking part in the ISO vote, the National Archives of Australia will have a major impact on the fate of OOXML as a standard, as it is responsible for the long-term guarding of their nation's intellectual and historical information.

"Our concerns with any formats are the long term sustainability of those formats. Our concerns are how any information that is encoded in any format can remain useable and accessible over very long periods of time - hundreds of years at least," said Michael Carden, technical manager for digital preservation.

The National Archives concerns toward the proposed standard are focused on the issue of implementability. Carden explained that there aren't enormous resources in software development available to the archives, "so not reinventing the wheel is fairly important to us".

He said that one of the benefits of XML is that it is readable by both machines and people when they are trying to read or write XML.

He said there are ways in which Microsoft's proposal is "XML, Jim, but not as we know it".

"The proposed XML uses very truncated syntax and for people to read it is not natural. It's very, very difficult for a software developer to make sense of the XML that is produced by that," Carden said.

"The justification for it of course is that it makes it smaller, [but] in practice that hasn't really turned out to be the case. That is just one example from a software developer's point of view where trying to implement it is unnecessarily challenging.

"We would look at something that is a relatively new format as being something that we would be implementing, encoding and rendering ourselves. And what we're seeing of the proposed specs so far is that the bar has been set too high for organizations such as ourselves," Carden said.

The symposium concluded with an afternoon legal session. IT and telecommunications lawyer Brendan Scott offers a summary of the key legal issues surrounding OOXML here.

Stayed tuned for Microsoft's OOXML: The Yes vote.