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Dark Corners of the OpenXML Standard
Standard Disclaimer writes "Most here on Slashdot know that Microsoft released its OpenXML specification to counter ODF and to help preserve its market position, but most people probably aren't aware of all the interesting legacy code the OpenXML specification has brought to light. This article by Rob Weir details many of the crazy legacy features in the dark corners of OpenXML. As it concludes after analyzing specification requirements like suppressTopSpacingWP, 'so not only must an interoperable OOXML implementation first acquire and reverse-engineer a 14-year old version of Microsoft Word, it must also do the same thing with a 16-year old version of WordPerfect.'"
The power of legacy systems is at once both Microsoft's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Nobody in OSS is going to have the patience to rebuild the same level of backwards compatibility needed to displace them but the code must be an absolute tarpit of accumulated cruft and security holes that's incredibly difficult for them to keep going.
ODF is the former SXW format that was taken and transformed into a standard by a committee comprising several Office software makers. It's suppose to describe the normal features that anyone should expect from any Word processing application, be it OpenOffice.org, KWord, AbiWord, Corel Word Perfect, etc. all this in a perfectly neutral way. It was designed with a function in mind (storing word processing documents in an open and interoperable way). Its benefits are comparable to the standardisation of HTML.
OpenXML is Microsoft trying to translate its proprietary DOC file inside a XML container (because it's a big buzzword) and propose it as a standart to ECMA (because everyone is speaking about ODF being an ISO standard). It describes not only what is to be expected from a word processor, but also all MS-Word specific microsoftism. It was designed with a specific software in mind (and partly derives from the internal functionning of MS-Word). It's only a small improvement over the previous MS XML format (which had a lot of informations hidden in a binary blob).
The good thing for Microsoft, is that they can pretend this limitation is "Not-a-bug-but-a-feature", and brag around that there are a lot of stuffs that MS-Word couldn't store inside an ODF and only OpenXML can carry.
Microsoft's plan :
1. Embrace
2. Extend <- They are here
3. Extinguish
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yeah. Because the person best suited to decide what a company should or should not be allowed to do are the people who own the company. Of course you're going to want to be completely unrestricted to mow down your competitors using whatever advantages you have if you are in a position to do so. What you're missing is that no one should be allowed to use unfair practices to do it. Some people think we should idolize the free market as some sort of religion. We don't like free market economy because it was given to us by the gods. We like it because it tends to result in better products and lower prices. That ceases to be true when you have a monopoly in the mix.
That being said, I'm not really informed about any Microsoft specifics, so I'm not going to argue in favor or against any "federal laws" as it applies to them (or failed to apply to them). However, suggesting that only people who have built a company that holds a monopoly should be able to decide what is fair regulation isn't rational. It may even be that the current federal laws regarding monopolies may be unfair and in need of reform, but the fact remains that the existence of a set of laws to regulate businesses is necessary.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
You seem to be missing the point.
You do not need these features to begin with in a new format that is inherently incompatible with an old format. You don't want to say "now I'm going to do WP style linespacing and my linespacing is 1".
If you want to convert a WP document to an XML document, the conversion program should know that the linespacing in WP is 0.9 times the linspacing in XML document (or what it really may be)and will then use linespacing=0.9 in the XML document. This is not a task of the new wordprocessor or its specification.
By adding this so-called "backward compatibility" to your specification, you make the spec overly difficult and in fact you make the conversion program in the new application when this is absolutely not necessary.
And on top of that, you require that the programmer who uses this spec should have knowledge of all these old versions and is able to program them without error. And as the application will grow because of these unnecessary features, the number of bugs will also rise. So this is not a blueprint for a good application, this is a blueprint for a very buggy implementation of a wordprocessor.