Tim Bray blogs about the head of ISO pooh-poohing the concerns about the way that Microsoft’s OOXML document format was strong-armed through his organization.

[Tags: standards odf ooxml tim_bray microsoft ]

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Tim Bray has a terrific piece on the development of XML, now in its tenth year as an official standard. He focuses on the people, not on the technicalities of the standard.

It’s worth it just to re-read Tim’s words about Yuri Rubinsky, an SGML advocate of enormous energy and passion, without a mean bone in his body. Tim puts it better. Yuri died way too young, and I miss him.

It’s also worth it to learn the off-the-mainstage history of XML, of course.

* * *

Tim is a terrific writer. And I’m happy to say that we’ve been friends for a long time (which is somewhere between disclosure and bragging). But, the one thing that put me off in his piece was his providing physical descriptions. I assume they’re accurate, and he writes them with flair, but they struck me as irrelevant. Why does it help me to know that someone is burly and someone else is buxom?

And yet, it does seem to help.

But maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe it only seems to help.

As you can tell, I’m torn by this. I’ve occasionally briefly described people in things I’ve written. But I don’t feel quite right about it

[Tags: xml tim_bray standards ]

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