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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."
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.
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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