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].'"

Comments

Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.