[LINK] Microsoft Office XML Formats? Defective by design

[Rick Welykochy]

jim birch wrote:

> On 27/08/07, Glen Turner <gdt at gdt.id.au> wrote:
>> It's not a train wreck for MS
> 
> 
> As far as MS are concerned, needing an army of programmers to negotiate a
> file format is ideal, since they can afford it and everyone else will fail
> at catch up to varying degrees or drop out.   It's what they've been doing
> all along, but now in XML.

It is far worse than that. As pointed out in the dessenting article,
<http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/OOXML-is-defective-by-design.html>
Microsoft is shoe-horning proprietary (secret) technologies as
well as ensuring that things like VML are ill-defined.

Proprietary and ill-defined specifications in an open standard
are tautological. No matter how big an army of programmers one
has, one simple cannot guess the missing specifications and hope to
implement them.

Read the above article, esp.
4) VML isn't XML [unspecified Office-specific configuration strings]
5) Open packaging parts minefield
7) Many ways to get in trouble [unfactored mass of Powerpoint,Word,Excel duplications]
8) Windows dates  [undocumented formatting patterns]
10) A world of ZIP+OLE files pi.e. encrypted OLE != encrypted ZIP]
11) BIFF is gone...not! [undocumented proprietary app-specific]
13) ECMA 376 documents just do not exist [binary data is added to "standard" documents]

If you weren't afraid, be very afraid. Especially if you plan on
implementing this horse cart of legacy, secretive and under-specified
bollocks.

The other seven points raised have very valid concerns of their
own and will indeed make it almost impossible to implement by anyone
except Microsoft. Example in point, "12) Document backwards compatibility subject to
neutrino radioactivity" which raises an ancient issue already discussed
to death on Link: incompatibilities amongst the various generations of
Office.



cheers
rickw



-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
      -- Mark Twain