1) The Belgian mirror group finds it very unfortunate for ISO to support and develop different office document description standards (such as ISO/IEC 26300 and ECMA 376) offering a number of similar functionalities. The group furthermore has been informed that for some of these standards future extensions are being proposed, which should further increase the overlap between their functionalities. The group therefore urges the organizations promoting those separate standards to work together, to develop a common set of functionalities and to integrate them into a unique common base that every document description standard should understand.
2) To facilitate this objective, the Belgian mirror group proposes to deal separately with the issue of backwards compatibility with existing legacy documents, which is also a very useful objective.