Standards Australia abstains in OOXML vote

Standards Australia has voted to abstain from the ISO/IEC JTC1 ballot to adopt the DIS 29500 OOXML (Microsoft's Office Open XML format) as an International Standard. I suggested a "no" vote, but abstention seems a reasonable compromise.

Standards Australia has cast a vote to abstain from the ISO/IEC JTC1 ballot to adopt the DIS 29500 Office Open XML format draft standard as an International Standard.

The decision to cast an abstain vote from the current ballot follows months of consultation and a clear lack of consensus in Australia on this issue by stakeholders. ...

From: "Australia abstains on Office Open XML vote", Media Release, Standards Australia, 3 September 2007

There is an article on this: Australian apathy results in OOXML abstain vote by Liam Tung, ZDNet Australia, 03 September 2007. Also there is a map showing votes cast (note that the usual color convention is reversed: red shows for and green against).

The decisions for XML and web standards are likely to get harder in the coming years and I have suggested some ways the process could be made easier.