Stephane Rodriguez Dismantles Open XML

Elektroschock writes "Stephane Rodriguez, a reengineering specialist who became popular for his article on MS Office 2007 binary data, now comprehensively debunks Microsoft's new Open XML format. With small case studies he demonstrates the impossible challenges third-party developers will face. His conclusion: it is 'defective by design.' Next week members of the International Standard Organization are likely to approve the format as a second official ISO standard for office documents, even though most nations have submitted comments. Rodriguez claims he is 'not affiliated to any pro-MS or anti-MS party/org[anization]/ass[ociation].'"

Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d

[David Gerard]

OOXML is a theoretically perfect standard that just happens to have no implementations whatsoever.

Re:Can anyone repro?

[gardyloo]

Interesting experiment. However, I suggest you do not title your posts "Can anyone repro?" on Slashdot. The answers you get may be, well, .... exciting and very, very scary.

Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d

[Shados]

Oh nice! So you mean the W3C took it over?

Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d

[man_of_mr_e]

No. What it means is that Office has so much legacy code that they can't rewrite it all to be conformant. Think of OOXML as a target that MS feels they can eventually meet with office, not necessarily what office will actually meet today. After all, much was changed in OOXML after Office 2007 went to bed. One would expect the next version of Office to be much closer to the spec, since they will have had a full design cycle to conform to it.

Re:This is not proof of OOXML being defective by d

[orcrist]

Did it ever occur to you that the Office 2007 was finished before the OOXML spec was? Remember, there were many changes in ECMA comittee long after Office 2007 was finalized.

My guess is, yes, it occurred to the poster you were responding to, since I highly doubt that when he wrote exactly that, it was in his sleep. Did it occur to you that reading his post all the way to the end might have resulted in slightly less of your foot being inserted into your mouth? ;-)