Verily I say unto thee, that Richard Rasker spake thusly:
> In short: there shall only be one true implementation of OOXML, and
> that is MS Office -- because OOXML is very closely modeled after the
> workings of MS Office, both past and present versions.
It is clear that a full implementation of OOXML is necessarily platform
(Windows) dependant, and that Microsoft cannot even implement their own
so-called standard properly, assuming that is possible at all, or that
they (or anyone else) actually knows what it is.
I was particularly dismayed to discover the rounding error condition
(Excel stores what /it/ wants, not what /you/ want), and that apparently
Microsoft believes the whole world should be speaking US English, rather
than standard English, without choice. This is no small issue, as the
blogger demonstrates WRT in-house developed tools.
And this section set alarm bells ringing:
.----
| At this point, we are left with the obvious question, if the
| SpreadsheetML is made much more complex than we would have expected
| only to cope with performance problems, what is the rationale for
| the binary workbook (.xlsb) ?
|
| Microsoft won't tell. There are two reasons however : 1)
| embarassing reality of XML 2) embarassing reality of ECMA 376
|
| To illustrate the first untold reality, suffice to create a new
| spreadsheet, and then query external data. As you do this, Excel
| 2007 creates a part called the connection data source part, where
| it stores the connection strings in plain text, among other things.
| It should be clear by now that connection strings contain sensitive
| information such as server names, login and passwords. OOps!
|
| The quick Microsoft solution to this? Security by obscurity, just
| turn this stuff into binary records (BIFF12), and the problem goes
| away in theory.
`----
What other sensitive information or garbage is Microsoft hiding in their
binary blobs?
What a mess.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "Proprietary licenses, the crack cocaine of software finance."
| - Matt Asay, CNET
`----
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
23:03:48 up 23 days, 21:58, 2 users, load average: 0.15, 0.17, 0.16
|
|
