Why Have Two Standards?

welcome to the weird and wonderful world of standards, it is full of standards that are the same! In the textiles world, you can have a test for normal fabrics which is identical to tests for coated fabrics which is identical to tests for geotextiles. Same equipment and same end point, ridiculous. That is unfortunately because the technical committees are full of people who like to lunch a lot and being on different tchnical committeees means more lunch!

one thing about standards, is after awhile the standards conflict with its own earlier standards that are still in effect.

Then the standards become the inspectors interpretation, which means what is acceptable at one time, is not another time, and then is acceptable a third time.

Yep, dead right. The only answer is for standard bodies like ISO and IEC to actually control the standards that they are publishing. The worst thing is that in Europe, an EN standard can become a form of pseudo legislation without going through the usual legal channels by being the most appropriate standard for a certain type of performance claim. This leaves people on standards committees, who are generally idiots, to make the pseudo laws. Its a case of the blind leading the blind!

I was really upsided when I've heard for the first time that MS with its MS-Office 2007

For the years Open Office originated from Star Word project had been based on XML. It was real contribution to XML protocol developing and popularization. Plus every release of Open Office could work with MS Office files, when neither MS-Office 2000 nor 2003 didn't recognize any XML or OpenOffice extentions.

And now they have condenscended to us mortals with their high standard.