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Stephane Rodriguez Dismantles Open XML
Elektroschock writes "Stephane Rodriguez, a reengineering specialist who became popular for his article on MS Office 2007 binary data, now comprehensively debunks Microsoft's new Open XML format. With small case studies he demonstrates the impossible challenges third-party developers will face. His conclusion: it is 'defective by design.' Next week members of the International Standard Organization are likely to approve the format as a second official ISO standard for office documents, even though most nations have submitted comments. Rodriguez claims he is 'not affiliated to any pro-MS or anti-MS party/org[anization]/ass[ociation].'"
"by design" is of course about motivation which we can know in OOXML from emails, quotes, obtuse or brittle design, and lack of specification.
The document contains all of these. I suggest that you read it.
By the way -- there's newly discovered undocumented Microsoft tech present in OOXML, such as SSPI ("Security Service Provider Interface") which is a proprietary Microsoft developed protocol for security providers, and OLE ("Object Linking and Embedding") which is for embedding (eg, taking an Excel spreadsheet and putting it into a Word document). This is undefined in OOXML only available on Microsoft Windows.
The relevant code from an ODF spreadsheet:
<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1">
<table:table-cell/>
−
<table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="123456.123456789">
<text:p>123456.12</text:p>
</table:table-cell>
</table:table-row>
-Q(1) What does Rodriguez's article show?
-Q(2) is OOXML in and by itself flawed?
-Q(3) What's the practical relevance of the question whether OOXML is flawed?
-Q(4) So what's in it for Microsoft? Why do they bother?
-
- Q(1) : What does Rodriguez's article show?
- A(1) : Rodriguez's article show that the OOXML format written by latest Microsoft Office applications, among them MS Excel, is:
- sorely defective in that you can't be sure to get your original data back after saving it to OOXML
- impossible to change outside MS Office applications
- tied to the MS Office way of representing internationalised versions of documents because "of the way Microsoft chose to store XML using the US English locale, no matter how good your implementation is, you have to retrofit it to work just like Office does" in order to accommodate internationalised documents
- MS Office legacy formats supported throughout, greatly (and unnecessarily) contributing to the size and complexity of the 6,000 page standard.
- Q(2): Is OOXML flawed in and by itself?
- A(2):Yes, I think so, partly because of Rodriguez's article, partly because of flaws documented elsewhere: see http://www.noooxml.org/petition The points 2,3,4,5 listed there seem especially crippling to me:
(2) There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
(3) There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
(4) More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
(5) There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;
- Q(3): What's the practical relevance of the question whether OOXML is flawed?
- A(3): Enormous. We currently see that Microsoft is trying to convince the world to accepted OOXML as an ISO "standard", whereas it's no such thing. It's too loosely defined, and opposed to the existing Opendoc standard there is no open-source reference implementation. So there will be a morass of possible implementations, of which only Microsoft's own implementations will be guaranteed mutually compatible. That's a polite way of saying that Microsoft simply aims at continuing its format lock-in, only this time the under the name of OOXML.
- Q(4) : So what's in it for Microsoft? Why do they bother?
- A(4) : Well ... Microsoft has a policy whereby it quite explicitly does not want other people's software, let alone Open Source software, to render MS Office documents correctly.
For reference, see this email, (cited from Rodriguez's article):
Is that