A new technical committee within Ecma International will produce a formal standard for XML Paper Specification (XPS) - Microsoft's alternative to Adobe's widely-used (though not fully open) PDF.

Once complete, the technical committee may offer the standard to its counterparts at ISO or IEC for broader adoption.

Open standards advocates have come out against what they see as an attempt to give a proprietary standard the imprimatur of a supposedly independent standards body.

Bob Sutor, vice president, open source and standards at IBM, commented in his blog "The standard must be compatible with Microsoft's implementation, which is the only implementation. How open. How independent. How collaborative. What do you think? Should we just save time and money and let Microsoft simply define international standards for us based on what they put in their products?"

Similarly, "The best reason for not approving OOXML/Ecma 376 as a global standard is that it will encourage other vendors to push for multiple, unnecessary standards rather than achieving consensus on a single standard that will best serve the needs of all stakeholders, and not individual proprietary vendors," blogged intellectual property lawyer Andrew Updegrove.

"[P]erpetuating one monopolistic market position after another seems wholly incompatible with the role of a global standards body, tasked with protecting the interests of all stakeholders," he added, "If OOXML, and now Microsoft XML Paper Specification, each sail through Ecma and are then adopted by ISO/IEC JTC1, then I think that we might as well declare "game over" for open standards."