Responses now complete for all 3,522 comments

Yesterday night Ecma TC45 and the Editor of DIS 29500 were able to publish the final drop of our responses to the 3,522 national body comments. The Ecma status report just went live today, and you can access it here: https://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/Proposed%20dispositions%20for%20National%20Body%20comments%20on%20DIS%2029500%20complete.htm . Many of the national bodies have already been following along with the progress over the past couple months, as Ecma continued to post the latest responses; and I think they'll all be happy to see the final draft ready.

It's been a ton of hard work over the past several months, and it really feels great to move onto the final stage of this process (I need some sleep). It's unbelievable how much work we've been able to accomplish within TC45. Similar to how we moved from a 2,000 page spec to a 6,000 in 2006, in 2007 we were able to respond to 3,500 comments and generated a 2,300 page document (a bit less that a page per comment) where I believe we were able to successfully handle the national bodies comments.

The most impressive part about TC45 was the diversity of skills and experience we had on the group. We had a large number of conference calls and a week long meeting in Japan to get to this point. Many people on TC45 actually worked through the winter holidays and through their own personal vacation time (thanks again everyone!). There were folks like BP who have huge amounts of documents in the corporation and their key concern is access to those documents and ensuring that they could use different tools on different platforms to access those documents. The US Library of Congress had a huge amount of experience in document archival, and the level of detailed review they brought was huge. The folks from Novell and Apple were both really helpful as they had already built Open XML implementations and they were able to provide the point of view of an implementer. It's not possible to name all the folks who helped make this happen, but I know that they are all as happy as I am with the results. We were able to help the editor pull together an even better specification, and we're all excited to continue moving the standard forward over the coming years.

-Brian