Few of OOXML's Flaws Have Been Addressed

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "IBM's Rob Weir has done a study on how many flaws were addressed by the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting. So far, using a random sampling technique, he has yet to find a flaw that was addressed, making the upper bound a paltry 1.5%. Even so, he's found a number of new flaws, including a security vulnerability: OOXML stores passwords in database connection strings in plain text. At least there were no mistakes on five of the first twenty five random pages he reviewed."

Comments

Office 2007

[number6x]

Do any of these flaws exist in Office 2007?

If not, why are they in the OOXML proposed standard. If the standard does not describe the OOXML format used by Microsoft, then what does it describe?

Why can't they just document the format that they use and get this over with? Or are they doing all this for show, and there is no real substance in OOXML?

Re:Office 2007

[TropicalCoder]

You'll remember Stéphane Rodriguez who gave us Microsoft Office XML formats? Defective by design back in August, 2007?

Since then, in February, 2008 he produced The truth about Microsoft Office compatibility and Typical B.S. in technical articles about OOXML and now Bad surprise in Microsoft Office binary documents : interoperability remains impossible Thursday, March 13, 2008.

These blogs are at the same level of depth as Rob Weir's latest blog, and demonstrate that Microsoft's policies as detailed below continue to this day.

From OOXML is defective by design...

"Mr Bill Gates in person sent in 1998 a memo to the Office product group (led by Steven Sinofsky at the time), memo undisclosed to the public thanks to the IOWA consumer case :"

From: Bill Gates

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.

-----------

Clearly the word is getting out about the problems in OOXML. Stéphane Rodriguez notes at the bottom of OOXML - Defective by design:

Update : this article was Slashdotted on Sunday 26 of August.

Update2 : this article is taking 300,000 hits a day, and is making it all around the world in all kinds of sites. My web host provider was so angry at the peak in traffic that he threatened to cut me off, so I had to redirect to a blog site such as Google's blogger to host the article.

Update3 : wednesday august 29, added a new section on Document security

Update4 : friday august 31, added more content to sections US English and Windows dates

Update5 : sunday september 2, added a quick comparison between ODF and ECMA 376

huh?

[trybywrench]

This may be off topic but why exactly are there database connection strings in a document format?

enough is enough

[BroadbandBradley]

how long will it take people to shrug off this death grip of MS and realize that it's costing billions in productivity? I received an XLS file of contacts yesterday and I figured I'd try using Outlook to import it into an address book so I could then sync to other things like Gmail. Outlook choked and recommended assigning values to the columns using another MS product - MS Excel. SO, I saved the file as CSV, and imported using Thunderbird which gave me an easy dialog to match up name,email, phone, website..and so on. Worked great! then I used thunderbird to open the second file and it remembered the previous adjustments and everything was already lined up! Awesome stuff and I wasn't prompted to buy any other products!

I'm seriously considering wiping all the PC's in my office and advising the staff to just learn Ubuntu to avoid this whole MS deathgrip. None of the staff are advanced users except my web guy who codes in a text editor anyhow. FMS.