Office 2007SP2 ODF Interoperability Very Bad

David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won't read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."

Comments

Chickens are coming home to roost

[benjymouse]

So let me get this straight:

• There is a problem with ODF being incomplete in several areas. Yet we hear ridicule over how the OOXML spec is 6000+ pages and ODF a mere 2000?
• There are multiple problems with OpenOffice ODF compliance (inherited by derived suites). Yet, this is somehow a Microsoft problem?
• One the one hand we require Microsoft to follow specs to the letter, and now we somehow fault them for doing so?

What is wrong about asking OpenOffice to follow the specs? How about ODF getting an ovarhaul to weed out ambiguities and to properly

What goes around comes around. ODF was initially just a clever assault launched by Sun and IBM. With one strike they propelled ISO into relevance and took Microsoft completely off-guard. But customers saw the light and started demand good standards. Only, it is now evident that ODF and the posterchild OpenOffice were never prepared for the success.

OpenOffice and derivatives, Sun and IBM just have to eat their own dogfood. Admit that the "perfect" ODF was at least partly a hype.

We've seen from the browsers what "lenient" parsing can lead to. It is called tag soup. Requiring all products to leniently compensate for ambiguities in the spec or faulty implementations are definately the wrong path!

The chickens are coming home to roost. Suck it up. Fix it instead of point fingers.