A key U.S. standards committee remains undecided about whether it will support a document standard proposed by Microsoft Corp., even while the company asserted that the committee has already signalled its "yes" in an upcoming vote. The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) said this week it still hasn"t decided whether it will vote in favor of Open XML in the upcoming ISO vote that would make the file format an international standard. However, Microsoft believes the U.S. vote will be in favor of Open XML, a format it created for its Office 2007 suite, because of a proposed ballot it said the INCITS executive board put out last week.
The INCITS represents U.S. interests in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a global standards body that is scheduled to vote on standardizing Open XML on Sept. 2. Open XML is an alternative to Open Document Format for XML (ODF), which has already been approved by the ISO and is used in rival Office suites from IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.