Wow – this has been a tough week. I arrived at the hotel here in Prague (I am currently waiting in Prague Airport for my flight back to Copenhagen) at around 21:00. I met Doug in Copenhagen and flew with him to Prague and in the airport we ran into Kimmo. After 15 minutes in my hotel room I went down to the bar to get a “welcome to Prague”-beer. After another 15 minutes I crawled back to my room completely devastated due to a flu I hadn’t been able to get rid of. 5 seconds later Florian called and ordered me to get my ass down in the basement wine-bar where he was having drinks with Doug and Megan. I went back to my room when the bar closed at around half past midnight, did some last-minute updates/tweets and almost cried myself to sleep because of near-death-like fatigue.
… and the meetings hadn’t actually started yet.
The next morning the meetings started with a joint session between WG4 and WG5 at the Czech Standardisation Institute. A total of 31 delegates attended this initial meeting. Apart from the SC34 officers (SC34 chair, SC34 secretariat, WG4 convener), there were delegates from Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, ECMA, Finland, France, Germany, Korea, Norway, South Africa, UK and USA. We had quite a lot of work on our table for these three days, and we immediately got to work after the initial pleasantries. A rough list of categories to be dealt with was “Defect reports”, “Rules of engagement” (or “Prime directives”), “Future work”, “Roadmap for future editions/corrections” and “Planning of future meetings and tele-conferences”.
If you’ve been following my twitter-feed (and the ones of Alex, Doug an Inigo) you’ll already have a notion of the insanely interesting things we talked about. But for those not following me (and you should!!!) we talked about sexy things like whether “named ranges” in spreadsheets were defined on the workbook-level or the worksheet-level, whether a reference to Unicode 5 implied dependencies of XML 1.1, whether xml:space applied to whitespace-only-nodes or just to trailing- and leading whitespace in element content, whether font-substitution algorithms in OOXML had a bias for Panose-fonts and if “Panose” really meant “Panose1” and suttle differences between the Panose-edition of Hewlett-Packard and the one of Microsoft (as far as I understood it, anyway)
Can you imagine all the fun we had?
And you know what? We didn’t stop talking about it during lunch, dinner nor brakes. As Doug noted in one of his tweets, the only difference between session and breaks was that during session, only one person talked at any given time.
Well, apart from all this fun, we made an enormous amount of progress. A total of about 169 defect reports have been submitted to us until this point, and we processed almost all of them. We didn’t close all of them, but we managed to process the most important ones and prepare ourselves for our first tele conference in mid April. We laid down some ground principles upon which we will make decisions in the future and we talked about a set of “Prime directives” to form a mental basis for our work (think: The three Laws of Robotics).
In short – it was a good week. I’ll post a series of blog posts in the next weeks outlining the results we achieved (and did not achieve) including both the extremely boring ones as well as the more controversial ones. So Watch this space …
PS: I almost forgot. Microsoft sponsored a dinner/buffet for the participating experts on Wednesday. But what was even cooler was that they had lined up a bunch of Ferraris and Lamborghinis for us outside the restaurant, and we could just take a pick to choose a car to take home. Mine was red! Is that wicked or what?
To the nitwits from <no>ooxml.org: Take it home, boys!
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