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Jeremy Allison On Microsoft, OOXML and Standards
An anonymous reader writes "OOXML is already Microsoft's "de facto" standard as implemented in Office 2007, so when would any changes arising from the Comments Resolution meeting in February 2008 be put in place? According to Jeremy Allison's latest column, when last minute changes were suggested for the CIFS standard, which Samba exists to disentangle, "the response came back from Microsoft that although the fixes were valid, unfortunately the code was already written and was going to be shipped in the next service pack. End of discussion. It wasn't even in a shipping product yet, but the specification was determined to be unchangeable as they didn't want to change their existing code.""
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it that in order for a file format to be accepted as an ISO standard there has to be at least a couple of independent working implementations? If Microsoft's OOXML is amended but the only piece of software which implements OOXML doesn't even follow the standard presented to ISO, where does that leave the OOXML's standardization?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
If this is supposed to be a standard, supposedly in the hands of a standards body, then why would it need Microsoft's permission to change the things that are broken in it. The standards body should change the spec to fix some of the worst deficiencies highlighted by the comments. And then if Microsoft doesn't change their code match, then point out that Microsoft's implementation is in breach of the standard.