OOXML: What's the big deal?
,----[ Quote ]
| If Microsoft wants OOXML to be taken seriously as a proposal for a document
| standard, only one option is on the table. Rather than try to develop a
| specification with every possible feature of any version of Microsoft Office,
| every flag or quirk that some document might use, focus on building a
| smaller, leaner, interchange format which provides core functionality in a
| fully-described and implementable fashion. Don't expose implementation
| quirks, such as Excel® calculation chains, to people who just want to copy a
| spreadsheet's data and formulas. Don't expose, or even refer to, the details
| of the VML library, or the DrawingML library, or anything like that; instead,
| provide a brand new, open, and completely specified, description of the data.
|
| When I wrote the Standards & Specs piece on XML some time back, I made an
| offhand reference to the notion of an XML format containing "<bytes>ff ff 00
| 03 [. . .]</bytes>". When I wrote it, I thought I was joking. I guess I
| wasn't.
`----
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-ooxmlstandard.html?ca=dgr-lnxw02aOOXMLBigDeal&S_TACT=105AGX59&S_CMP=GR
So, it's the same f* s* it has always been. In a new article, Microsoft's
former Excel manager explains why:
Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some
workarounds)
,----[ Quote ]
| They were not designed with interoperability in mind. The assumption, and a
| fairly reasonable one at the time, was that the Word file format only had to
| be read and written by Word. That means that whenever a programmer on the
| Word team had to make a decision about how to change the file format, the
| only thing they cared about was (a) what was fast and (b) what took the
| fewest lines of code in the Word code base.
|
| [...]
|
| They have to reflect all the complexity of the applications. Every checkbox,
| every formatting option, and every feature in Microsoft Office has to be
| represented in file formats somewhere. That checkbox in Word’s paragraph menu
| called “Keep With Next” that causes a paragraph to be moved to the next page
| if necessary so that it’s on the same page as the paragraph after it? That
| has to be in the file format.
`----
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
Related (days ago):
OOXML Contains Proprietary Microsoft Codecs (as 'Standard')
,----[ Quote ]
| ECMA removes some Microsoft's formats from the list of examples. Does that
| mean that ASF and WMV are excluded from the list of supported codecs? Of
| course not, it is a list of suggestions, and Any supported video type is
| supported, and the ECMA intentions are pretty clear:
|
| we do not believe that preventing the use of other codecs is appropriate,
| as it will prevent innovation
|
| And when it comes to address the reference to Quicktime, it is a patented
| format which requires royalty payments to MPEG-LA suckers.
|
| Again, ECMA seems devoted to say: Good Bye Interoperability!
`----
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-41316/good-bye-interoperability-2-with-proprietary-audio-and-video-formats
DIS-29500: Deprecated before use?
,----[ Quote ]
| Simultaneously, ECMA addresses this in Response 34 of its proposed
| Disposition of Comments by removing all references to idiosyncrasies from the
| specification and placing them in a newly formed Annex for deprecated
| information. With the removal of this information from the DIS-29500, the
| design goal of MS-OOXML can no longer be met. The entire specification has
| therefore effectively become obsolete.
`----
http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-idiosyncrasies
This binary part supports the storage of arbitrary user-defined data.
,----[ Quote ]
| <Relationships xmlns="…">
| <Relationship Id="rId7"
| Type="http://.../customProperty"; Target="CustomProperty.bin"/>
| </Relationships>
|
| [...]
|
| Conclusion: Since there is no requirement on the format of the content, any
| vendor can put its proprietary binary extensions in there.
|
| Good Bye Interoperability!
`----
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-41994/good-bye-interoperability-3-with-binaries-inside
|
|
