Microsoft's OOXML Formulas Could Be Dangerous 360
hill101 writes "According to Rob Weir's blog, Microsoft's 325-page OOXML specification for spreadsheet formulas is deeply flawed. From basic trigonometric functions that forget to specify units, to statistical functions, to critical financial functions — the specification does not contain correct formulas that could possibly be implemented in an interoperable way. Quoting Mr. Weir: 'It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to the standard, may cause loss of life, property, and capital... Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.'"
EULA? (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't you read your Office EULA?
Microsoft specifically disclaims any damage relating to loss of life, property, or capital.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
now arriving at Dallas-Fort Worth... (Score:4, Funny)
"Hi everybody!"
"Hi Doctor Nick!"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"The Bush administration largely gets it backwards, they say health care is expensive because of lawsuits. I say lawsuits are expensive because of our health care system." William M. Sage, Columbia University law professor and physician.
Mr. Sage might be a law professor and physician, but he is obviosly not an economist. You have to be pretty foolish to believe that making doctors pay millions in insurance premiums, and driving thousands out of the medical field for fear of lawsuits, wouldn't make health care more expensive.
Name dropping Bush is a nice touch too... usually when people can't make a coherent arguement, they throw the word "Bush" into their sound bite, because Bush is extremly unpopular and that is enough to make people lose
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Mr. Sage might be a law professor and physician, but he is obviosly not an economist. You have to be pretty foolish to believe that making doctors pay millions in insurance premiums, and driving thousands out of the medical field for fear of lawsuits, wouldn't make health care more expensive.
Yeah, when you require such an important job be done right, *of course* it's going to cost more. At least, up front. In the long term, however, it's much, much better.
Capping medical malpractice awards is another way of saying, "limiting the rights of the victim". Aren't you conservatives supposed to be all in favor of victim's rights? If your doctor screws up, don't you think you have rights to compensation under the law? Capping compensation is like capping prison sentences. It's like saying, no matter h
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, doing a job to too high standards can kill people
That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about malpractice insurance. If the standards are set to high, that's the problem with the standards, not the insurance itself.
I believe the rights of the accused trump any right of the alleged victim
We're not talking about the accused. We're talking about the guilty. If you're found *guilty* of malpractice, you must pay, and there should be no artificial cap--you pay what you deserve to pay. Until you're found guilty, you most certainly deserve rights to protect you from malicious or unmerited persecution. It seems to me you
EULA applies to a "standard"? (Score:2)
Impartial reviews (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Impartial reviews (Score:5, Funny)
1. "not" should be capitalized;
2. "nazi", as a proper noun, should be capitalized;
3. "words" should be singular, as you are referring to one single word, "check";
4. "im" should be capitalized and spelled with an apostrophe;
5. there should be a period after "mistake"; and
6. "cheque" is, if not only the British spelling, interchangeable with "check" -- in an international forum such as the Internet, both are acceptable.
Please surrender your club card at the next meeting. Have a nice day.
Re:Impartial reviews (Score:5, Informative)
That's the rule for American English. British English is often more logical.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/quot
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.htm
Re:Ok, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It got off to a bad start.
A document standard is a practical necessity to express everyday ideas in a readable format. Not to be technically accurate and practically useless. Try typing HCl + NaOH --> NaCl + H2O in Office, and watch yourself breaking the monitor.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Why is there a 'Student Edition' of MS Office at 80% discounts if MS doesn't pander to high school students?
Every high school I know teaches angles in degrees, not radians. When someone changes their stance completely, we say "It's a U turn or a 180-degree shift" Should we say
Re:Guess what? (Score:5, Informative)
1: What is the default argument
2: Is the specification consistent across all functions which use this type of value as an argument
A specification which conforms to neither proper or common usage is worse than no specification at all
This is what Rob Weir was saying.
Re:Guess what? (Score:5, Informative)
From wikipedia:
"The number 360 as the number of 'degrees' (i.e. smallest practical sub-arcs) in a circle, and hence the unit of a degree as a sub-arc of 1360 of the circle, was probably adopted because it approximates the number of days in a year. Its use is often said to originate from the methods of the ancient Babylonians. Ancient astronomers noticed that the stars in the sky, which circle the celestial pole every day, seem to advance in that circle by approximately one-360th of a circle, i.e. one degree, each day. Primitive calendars, such as the Persian Calendar used 360 days for a year. Its application to measuring angles in geometry can possibly be traced to Thales who popularized geometry among the Greeks and lived in Anatolia (modern western Turkey) among people who had dealings with Egypt and Babylon.
Another motivation for choosing the number 360 is that it is readily divisible: 360 has 24 divisors (including 1 and 360), including every number from 1 to 10 except 7. For the number of degrees in a circle to be divisible by every number from 1 to 10, there would need to be 2520 degrees in a circle, which is a much less convenient number.
Divisors of 360: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Btw, comparing Excel (Excel users) to a programming language (programmers) is a stretch at best.
MS claims this is a FULLY DEFINED STANDARD (Score:5, Informative)
When other people claim a standard is fully defined, it means that all the standard use cases are defined* - units, expected parameters, optional parameters, etc. In the real world, nobody uses radians. Radians are used by engineers & scientists. Pilots, backyard builders, school children, and the occasional office worker use degrees.
To be honest, nobody cares if OOXML defines SIN(x) to take radians, degrees, gradians, or hyperbian-arc-vectors. What we care about is that someplace in the fully defined standard, OOXML needs to say:
DEFINE: SIN(x[,unit])
That's how a proper standard useable for international work in multiple fields is defined. You do not just dump your US help file into the standard & call it done. I have had to deal with a lot of standards, both Military and Industrial, the OOXML standard is well below the grade of the average Mil or Ind standard.
That's before you get to the point of inclusions in the standard like "Must Replicate Office 98 Behaviour for this feature". Now, if there was a reference to another standard that defined Office 98 behaviour, then it's not a problem. However, I don't see a reference included in the OOXML standard. Worse, for dates, OOXML defines the proper behaviour as their broken implimentation of the Gregorian Calendar - a direct conflict to the existing ISO standards.
I don't care who sponsored this standard, it's not a properly writen standard. It has huge holes & it's contradictory to several existing standards. Either one should get it rejected. If MS cleans it up so it meets the actual requirements of a "STANDARD" then they should get approved. If they leave it as the crap heap it is, it should be rejected.
*- if passing sqr(-6) as a unit works in the implimentation, that's not the standards problem. However, if the standard fails to mention the default unit type & the existance of the unit parameter, then there's an issue.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
That's a ridiculous thing to say. We are talking about a specification that applications are meant to IMPLEMENT, not second guess. If a function takes radians it should just say it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But the difference with the microsoft OOXML is that the units are sensed automagically as part of the result computations. The use of radians rather than degrees is specified by a combination of having administrator privileges, the insti
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Take a scientific calculator
input the expression "cos (2*PI)" (or the nearest equivalent syntax). Now press Exe, or =, or the equivalent. Which result did you get, 0.99399 or 1?
Now, let's try again. This time, try "sin (PI/2)": is the result 0.0274 or 1?
Now, having ascertained that dimensionless units, derived from something else or not, can indeed vary, and that your affirmations were meaningless, you can take your arrogance and shove it.
Re:Ok, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
That Wikipedia page you referred to us using the derived unit of "radians". There are a couple of different ways to represent that number - degrees, radians, grads. Hell, anybody that's ever used a calculator knows you have to use just one of those systems for your particular calculator.
Nice try, but do a little more research before posting and blasting somebody's article with illogical arguments.
Someone else failed the math class (Score:4, Insightful)
Other measurement systems use different units for angles, for example degrees.
In short, a thing being dimensionless does not mean no units are used to measure it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ok, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Can someone help me? I want to take the sin of a right angle in Excel. Can someone tell me where the pi key on the keyboard is, so I can type in pi/2 radians?
Re:Ok, but... (Score:4, Funny)
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pffft....as if this has ever been much concern to software manufacturers before.
Every EULA has boilerplate text denying all responsibility , and you'd be mad to trust any results from software implicitly. Double check it yourself , even if it's just a few corner cases.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
* We trust all hand tools like wrenches and sockets to be exactly the size on the label
* We trust all of our doctor's opinions whether or not a second opinion is recommended
* We trust our math applications to do math properly
* We trust our spell checkers to check properly
In general, we trust the things we by to work as expected... as advertised. (No, I haven't seen Excel advertised to be accurate, but in a math application, it's implied by its very existence) So to say that you should re-check the results by hand is not just ridiculous, it would never happen.
I remember when the Pentium processor first came out and there was this math error in there somewhere. It was a BIG deal.
But before passing too much judgment on this too quickly, a little verification of the bugs might be helpful and let's mark our calendars to see how fast Microsoft fixes the problem... oh wait, the problem is said to be in the file specification? What does that mean if they update the format specification with regards to their ISO certification?
Re: (Score:2)
For me , it'd probably be when the personal financial loss involved gets over $1000 or so, then the trust in what is essentially a black box starts to go down.
I worked for a time in a lab reporting on coal samples. Penalties for incorrect spec coal can easily end up being half a million bucks for one shipment. My spreadsheets were a small step in the chain of reporting and they took a lot of tedious calculations out of the loop, but I made damn sure they were c
Re: (Score:2)
I don't. I could list lots of dubious or wrong words I've found as "suggested" by various spell checkers, and as many errors they just ignore. Not to mention the problem of the wrong, but correctly spelled, word (horde/hoard, strait/straight, there/their, lose/loose....)
Implied warranty - fit for the purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
>
> * We trust all hand tools like wrenches and sockets to be exactly the size on the label
> * We trust all of our doctor's opinions whether or not a second opinion is recommended
> * We trust our math applications to do math properly
> * We trust our spell checkers to check properly
>
> In general, we trust the things we by to work as expected... as advertised.
http://www.oandp.com/edge/issues/articles/2006-08
http://www.brajeshwar.com/finance/insurance/Liabi
These links refer to the concept you're talking about. The second refers to the UK Consumer Protection Act, but the concept is general and fairly well accepted. From the first link:
"...any product that is sold comes with an implied warranty of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose; and, just by selling a product, a seller is implicitly promising that: (1) the product is merchantable, i.e., fit for the ordinary purposes for which such products are to be used, provided that the seller is in the business of selling products of that kind; and (2) the product is fit for a particular purpose, provided that the seller, at the time of sale, knew the particular purpose for which the product was required, and the buyer relied upon the seller's skill or judgment in selecting a suitable product for that purpose."
This hasn't been successfully applied to software cases like this, but the issue hasn't be ruled out either. But it's hardly a stretch to expect that software such as a spreadsheet comes with an implied warranty that ordinary financial and statistical calculations are properly performed.
Re: (Score:2)
* We trust all hand tools like wrenches and sockets to be exactly the size on the label
* We trust all of our doctor's opinions whether or not a second opinion is recommended
* We trust our math applications to do math properly
* We trust our spell checkers to check properly
I don't know how many think like I do, but I generally take everything with a grain of salt. I have never trusted 100% any doctor opinion. If there is something I may say that I trust completely, this is probably rigourous mathematical proofs. Everything else is not to be trusted completely. But it also depends on what definition you put on the word trust.
A socket may not be of the correct size: The assembly line might have malfunctioned at some point, or a worker might have been sleepy during work.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
* We trust all hand tools like wrenches and sockets to be exactly the size on the label
OK, I'm with you here.
* We trust all of our doctor's opinions whether or not a second opinion is recommended
I guess you have a good health and don't see doctors often, or you would never say this.
* We trust our math applications to do math properly
Really? I live in a scientific environment and I've never seen a colleague who put his/her full trust in a mathematical program.
* We trust our spell checkers to check
Re: (Score:2)
I do, generally, trust my doctor. But not blindly. If I for whatever reason think that something he says sounds dubious, and it is important, I can and *will* get a second opinion, regardless of if he recomends that or not.
I sure as *hell* don't trust gen
Re: (Score:2)
If the wrench is mislabeled or out of spec, the worst that happens is it doesn't fit right. Attempting to use a wrench that doesn't fit right will, at worst, damage the nut or bold. Since you're using the tool to begin with, you should have the mechanical aptitude necessary to say "hey, this doesn't fit right..." - which is exactly the opposite of "trusting" the tool. (The decision to use it anyway is up to the individual)
W
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, technically we trust our hand tools to conform to the nominal size specifications that go along with the size on the label and thus interface correctly with any connector that also conforms to that nominal size specification.
A 3/8" wrench is not 3/8" EXACTLY, it is some close approximation of 3/8" toleranced such that a correctly toleranced bolt that is a close approximation of 3/8" is guaranteed to be smaller (in
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Every EULA has boilerplate text denying all responsibility
I can't believe this is still happening... Imagine, for example, that your kitchen range or your kitchen table or your window AC unit came with such a document?
Re: (Score:2)
Typical Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble is that the politicians standardizing on this spec will look only at its length and declare it to be good. Maybe Microsoft made the specification long with that intent in mind.
Meaningless statement (Score:3, Insightful)
What percentage of those who praise ODF specifications actually read it? Or any other specification? I would imagine it is a small percentage.
Surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, I really really get annoyed at Microsoft.
Congress as role-model? (Score:5, Funny)
Damned if we know.
Signed,
The US Congress
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's a 6000 page specification. The 325 pages concerned are only the specifications for the formulas.
As per usual though, Microsoft has proven that greasing enough palms will get even an international standard approved without much review. Something the medical industry has known for years.
To quote someone (Denis Leary?): "They drove a dump truck of money up to my house, man. I'm not made of stone!"
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully the spec will be fixed. A spec is even more easily fixed than software!
Re: (Score:2)
Proof that open formats are a good idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the format was an "open" standard, the serious flaws present in the format were quickly and correctly identified by third parties outside of Microsoft.
If it had been a trade secret, it could have been bundled into a product, and assumed to be reliable by its users. Instead, it's been exposed for what it is.
If anything, this proves that open formats are a good idea.
And proof that single-ownership is bad (Score:4, Interesting)
a) wait until MS change the standard
b) then progress it through the "approvals" procedure
c) find out again if there are any problems (and go back to a)
d) implement these changes
And when it comes to WordSpacingLikeWord95 or whatever, how has this being "open" helped? People have asked what it means and been told nothing useful.
Oh, and doesn't this show that if MS had opened up the standard for perusal BEFORE filing it (like ODF did), wouldn't we have avoided this problem?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, we could look at ODF to see. Take one problem, from the article:
So where i
Re:Proof that open formats are a good idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a good thing, because it is not a free format. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If it had been a trade secret, it could have been bundled into a product, and assumed to be reliable by its users. Instead, it's been exposed for what it is.
Exactly! Imagine a Hospital implementing OOXML for it's entire IT needs, and a prescription reads: 1 tbsp Terramycin, twice daily. If a patient sues the hospital for wrong dosage, lots of red faces will be guaranteed.
FTA:
The CONVERT function (Part 4, Section 3.17.7.48) converts from one unit to another. Some conversions explicitly allowed include liquid measure conversions such as from liters to cups or tablespoons. But whose cup and whose tablespoon? Traditional liquid measures vary from country to country. In the US, a cup is 8oz, except for FDA labeling purposes when a cup is 240ml. But in Australia a cup is 250ml and in the UK it is 285ml. Similarly a tablespoon has various definitions. OOXML is silent on what assumptions an application should make. I guess I won't be using OOXML to store my recipes, and certainly not to calculate medical doses!
Re: (Score:2)
Take 1/72nd of a cup of morphine!!!! STAT!!!
That's where we have to wait what ISO does (Score:2)
But that remains to be seem, maybe Microsoft has enough clout to get it approved anyway. It seems that ECMA did not care much about quality when accepting OOXML, lets hope ISO does better.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"You could find similar problems in virtually all specs"
Well I would like to see your evidence of that! Having worked on the the original C standard extensively and done a fair bit of work on the C++ standard, I find it rather annoying that an unsubstantiated statement like this is trotted out.
In the standards committee it was typical to find 50 people in a room reading *each* *single* *word* of the draft standard and arguing for hours over a single line - 8 hours a day for five days at a stretch. Immense attention to detail was spent on considering every possi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have been involved in drafting the C standard then you should be aware of the list of defect reports [open-std.org]. You should know that it is almost impossible to precisely specify every single detail that a normal working human would naturally assume.
The standard is far f
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Any standard that's intended for human readership will suffer precisely because it's written for humans. Attempts to use formal specifications (perhaps denotational semantics or something like 'Z') haven't really caught the public imagination though it would have been interes
Re:Proof that open formats are a good idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
But, the point is that MOOXML is a shitty open format. It was written in a closed environment, without a decent review by anyone, in 1/20th the time you'd expect a spec of that size to take, and is being put on a "fast-track" process to ISO which means - if it goes through - it will never have had a proper review by anyone.
Yes, having the format be open is a good thing.
But this format is utter crap, on many different levels. It's size, complexity, inconsistency, bugginess, NIH-iness, reliance on Win32, etc., etc., etc.... make it completely unsuitable to be ratified as an ISO standard.
When you're turning something into an international standard, you want to take your time and get it right. That's what the standardisation process should be about. Creating something usable by as many parties as possible. MOOXML fails completely here.
Yes, I'm in favour of them opening their document formats. I wish they'd release updated documentation for the binary
Just want to point out... (Score:2, Informative)
If someone thinks that these functions even MIGHT work with degrees, than they sho
Re: (Score:2)
To quote
Re:Just want to point out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mars probes anyone? (Score:2)
Calculator in Windows 2000 does not... (Score:2)
From this, I infer that it is not always assumed at Microsoft that trig functions take arguments in radians. So if the same corporation presents a "standards" document where the argument format is undefined, I'd also ask for clarification
Assumption is the mother.... (Score:2)
That's the whole idea. A standard is meant to *AVOID* the pitfalls of assumption (which tend to be different for different people)
So uhm. Get real.
And if you're the professional you say you might possibly be, then your calculator example is even more retarded, since any sort of professional scientific calculator *will* actually tell you what baseX it's currently working in. (Mine sure
Re: (Score:2)
Let's not get ahead of ourselves... (Score:2)
Capital and property I can see, but until stories start popping up about people dying because of spreadsheet errors, let's tone down the hyperbole, alright?
Re: (Score:2)
You run a charity which provides food to homeless people. A spreadsheet error makes you believe that your budget is only 10% of what it was last year. You drastically cut back your work. Someone dies of starvation.
Life can still be lost indir
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The Israeli kidnap and asassination department are looking through their targets spreadsheet where a simple spreadsheet error has flagged your address at the top of their list. Next day you are kidnapped, tortured and killed.
A s
Yeah, I'm sure this guy is objective (Score:2, Insightful)
Who is the author, Rob Weir?
So a guy working on a different document format, for a company who competes with Microsoft, has unkind words? Color me shocked.
Uh... ODF doesn't define spreadsheet formats. There's no standard for spreadsheets in ODF. How is that "parroting the par
Re:Yeah, I'm sure this guy is objective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, I'm sure this guy is objective (Score:4, Interesting)
If you read the article it isn't a cople of minor mistakes which can be corrected; it's a number of mistakes which have already made it past a review stage.
Re: (Score:2)
Just like it references some other open specs for other parts, it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So a guy working on a different document format, for a company who competes with Microsoft, has unkind words? Color me shocked.
A competitor has a vested interest in exposing short-comings of his competition. So an IBM employee is the best critic of a competing Microsoft product. Why is this hard to understand? Why not criticise the views expressed, rather than the person he is OR his employers?
As for spreadsheet formats not being defined in ODF - it isn't a big deal, and the alliance seem to be working on the issue, in any case. A wrong formula is infinitely worse than No Formula.
I wonder what your vested interest is... your lack
Surely we all saw this coming (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody keeping a comprehensive and up-to-date list (or list of lists) of specific things that are wrong with OOXML? I see a bunch of scattered ones here and there. Of course, I've also wished there were a comprehensive list of specific "bad" things that MS has done; it would make demonstration of their unscrupulousness that much easier.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Surely we all saw this coming (Score:5, Informative)
ODF doesn't even have a formula standard. (Score:2)
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormu
Re: (Score:2)
Deeply Flawed Spreadsheet Formulas? (Score:2, Funny)
I never understand why people complain so much (Score:4, Insightful)
Let MS do exactly what they want, they seem quite successful at it, if it bites them in the butt, so be it. I would just like our own software freedoms to be preserved. I have no intention on producing anything with their format, I'm sure I'll eventually have to read it, but the chances that the receiver of a document is liable for inaccurate content within that document seems very low.
What is the motivation, since I'm sure there must be a good one, to do this free work for MS?
Microsoft can't code (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazing. That's the sort of mistake you'd expect from a First Year Computer Science Major, but not from a Second Year. This isn't the first time Microsoft have done this. Even for the Windows API, the code trumped the documentation. The best way to find out what a feature did was to write test programs to poke at it. Heck. Until recently DirectX needed three pages of goobleydo-gook to start up. These people just don't get APIs, period.
In Microsoft Visual Studio when you press F1 Help it comes up with a list that includes "How to Write Good Code". Yes, by Microsoft. Even in the early hours of the morning, it gets a smirk if not a gufaw or a laugh. Microsoft are not good programmers. Haven't been for a long time. Anyone worth their salt will launch a Start Up, or at least join a company offering reasonable growth and prospects. Microsoft is like a Pyramid Scheme. The people that joined at the start did very well. As for the people that joined late... not a chance. Which makes you wonder about the ones that joined anyway. Read the Book "Microserfs".
> Ecma
Why didn't Ecma pick it up? These Standard Bodies are in-name only. When a "Member" wants to push something through, it gets pushed through. Then the Member's sales reps can go to the Government body and say "Look! We have an Ecma approved Standard" and t he Government worker ticks the "Uses Industry Standards" box on the tender.
One of the funnier "standards" was a simulation standard called HLA. It was approved before anyone had built a proof of concept. People bet their careers on it and the whole government was ordered to embrace it. The only problem: When they finally built it, it didn't work. *OUCH!*
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Example 1: a square
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
no units ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Trignometric functions are unitless to begin with. They are ratios.
Article on BBC (Score:3, Informative)
The BBC have published an article by FSFE [bbc.co.uk] also explaining the general problems of MS's non-open OOXML format (and proprietary formats in general).
Shame?! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it."
Reminds me of something I once heard a congressman rationalize in reference to a bill he just voted for containing several lame provisions (many with which he did not even agree): "Do you have any idea what reading a bill like that would entail?" I do. It would entail you doing your fucking job.
This is to be expected... (Score:3, Interesting)
I WISH it was that "good"... :-( (Score:3, Informative)
I wish it was that "good". :-(
The OOXML spec seems to be a dump of the MS Office data formats, so it should already be decades old. But sure, let us not assume malice when stupidity will suffice as explanation. I mean, we don't speak about condemned criminal here, do we? Oh, wait...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Err, what makes you think the OOXML spec isn't just a backhand way of "documenting" whatever Microsoft Office does anyways? Some of the tags are dead giveaways: "autoSpaceLikeWord95", "useWord97LineBreakRules", "useWord2002TableStyleRules".
The spec often refers to what various versions of Office do, without stating what that is. Probably much the same way that whe
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
In the MSDN documentation for
Note This feature has been designed to be used in conjunction with a prerelease version of an anticipated successor to Microsoft Visual Studio
Now it took a while to parse that and I decided that I might possibly in the future write some code for it but only if I cannot find a better IDE/ and dev system.
M
Re: Circular Reference Implementation (Score:4, Insightful)
Further, if ooxml is as "free" as MS would have politicians believe, then referring back to a proprietary product destroys that "freedom". (It's really not free, anyway, but just for the sake of discussion...)
Re:MS Office approx. Reference Implementation (Score:4, Informative)
-And who guarantees that the "reference implementation" is still available 5 years from now? (hint: Microsoft tends to discontinue sale of its products after a few years).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
However, in practise does MS office not act as a reference implementation to clear
up ambiguities? ''
That's how Microsoft works. That's not how standards work.
The right way to handle this would be to take the whole thing away from Microsoft, who clearly doesn't have people who can do the job, and give it to people who have experience with standards, and let them create a workable standard. Then Microsoft can try to create an ap