Submission + - Did Microsoft buy Kazakhstan?
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's open letter on Interoperability, Choice and Open XML is mocked by Opera's CTO in a CNET article titled Microsoft's amusing standards stance. Microsoft claims that governments wants a "choice" among standards.
Further, Microsoft's technical contributions to standards — and in particular Jean Paoli's (who co-authored the open letter) contributions to W3C — is questioned:Which countries? Is it Kazakhstan by any chance? Kazakhstan recently joined the relevant ISO group. In the past, consultants paid by Microsoft have joined standardization groups and become sympathetic voices. Are they buying countries this time?
The author is not a fan of ODF, though, calling it a "memory dump with angle brackets around it". Instead, he suggests an advanced document format based on HTML and CSS that can be viewed in common browsers.One of the authors of that submission was Jean Paoli. It is unlikely that he did much of the technical work on XSL, and he was probably listed for political reasons. Similarly, he was listed as an editor of the XML specification after Microsoft made some phone calls.
