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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.
OOXML is a theoretically perfect standard that just happens to have no implementations whatsoever.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
It's deliberate. The standard is just a distraction, to keep competitors busy trying to implement it, while documents are actually being created in the Office 2007 variant of OOXML. A few months of legacy almost guarantees a transition to the real OOXML would be an uphill battle, especially with no real documentation of how *either* format works. So even with a supposed 'standard' and a near-enough implementation, the vendor lockin is just as strong as it was with the binary formats.
Sam ty sig.
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.
If Office can't read OOXML files produced by other tools, and other tools can't read Office OOXML files, where do you suppose end users will place the blame?
And what do you suppose users will do when faced with incompatibilities?
It's a brilliant strategy: Define a new "standard" but don't quite implement it yourself, ensuring that no one can implement a competitive office suite that is compatible with yours. Further, make the standard complex and weird enough that you can always blame inconsistencies on the other implementations. Voila! You get to proclaim to the world that your de facto standard office suite supports an open, ISO-blessed international standard format -- but with no worries about losing your lock-in.
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