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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].'"
Um, isnt the fact that not even Microsofts own software can handle OOXML which btw. is designed by Microsoft themselves, proof enough that something is seriously wrong with the design of OOXML?
I mean if not even the maker of OOXML can get it to work properly in its own products, how are third parties supposed to do it? And if no one is able to implement OOXML correctly, what is this "standard" good for besides being a great smoke-and-mirrors tactic by Microsoft themselves?
Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998
To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky
Subject : Office rendering
One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.
We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.
I would be glad to explain at a greater length.
Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.
I'm not saying this as some linux nut job but its things like that which just drive me nuts. Regardless of which ever os I prefer that kind of thinking just boils my blood.
How can any committee deciding on open standards seriously take a company which has been proven time and time again to play by its own rules and whenever it offers something labeled OPEN its about as open as the doors to Fort Knock are to the average person.
This "OpenXML" stunt is just a smokescreen covering Microsofts controlled retreat in the office format battle. It only needs to keep parties distracted until Microsoft has reclaimed the control over business content by means of vendor lockin v2.0 aka Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.
/ 2007/04/while_you_were.html
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/mia/?p=198
This is not proof of OOXML being defective by design. It only shows that apparently MS's software isn't able to handle OOXML properly.
OK, lets have MS have their choice either way on this one.
If their office tools work well but are not using the OOXML spec, they must be using some other spec, perhaps MOOXML. In which case they are not OOXML compliant.
On the other hand, if they want to be OOXML compliant then I guess Redmond programmer can't read their own spec and thus are having problems being compliant.
Either way, and for whatever reason Microsoft is not compliant with their own spec. Shall we call this MOOXML? And while I have only read a part of the spec, it is far too "undefined" and thus ambiguous to be reliable used by itself. A standard needs to be defined enough, that 2 or more parties could take the standard document specifications, run off and program it from scratch. And have a reasonable chance that their code will inter operate on the same data sets.
Trouble is, if Microsoft cannot do that, how is anyone else?
But might I submit, Microsoft wrote office and then wrote the spec. A poster child of why you think about and write the spec before the software is a good practice.