Today ISO approved the Open Office XML format as an ISO standard.
It’s always sad when i have to cut out an entry from my ‘respected authorities’ list, and this time i have to do it with ISO. Now that i think about it, i never really followed whether ISO is a respectable authority or not, but somehow, by default assumed it is. Maybe it never was.
There are several reasons why i don’t like Open Office XML, i will describe here some of them. please note, that i was unable to download the final version, that was accepted by ISO. all i could get was the one accepted by ECMA, and i assume they are similar. if not, please correct me in the comments.
the spec contains attributes like autoSpaceLikeWord95 (section 2.15.3.6), which basically means that you have to do some formatting the same way as Word 95 does it.it is not specified how it should be done. so if someone wants to implement it, he should try it in Word 95? in other words, only the company which has the source code for Word 95 can implement this feature correctly. OOXML proponents will probably point out, that the spec says that this attribute is deprecated and should not be used in new document. this is true. but, on the other hand, why is it in the spec at all? and even if it is deprecated, here is what will happen: Microsoft’s implementation will be able to read/write this correctly, and other implementations will not. and the customer will only see that in Microsoft’s program it works, but in an other program it does not work. that simple.
the spec is very inconsistent. uses different tags/namespaces/attributes for the same thing in different document-types. for example, see how to make the text bold and aligned to right in the various document-types (source):
| Format | Text Color | Text Alignment |
|---|---|---|
| OOXML Text | <w:color w:val=”FF0000”/> | <w:jc w:val=”right”/> |
| OOXML Sheet | <color rgb=”FFFF0000”/> | <alignment horizontal=”right”/> |
| OOXML Presentation | <a:srgbClr val=”FF0000”/> | <a:pPr algn=”r”/> |
| ODF Text | <style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000”/> | <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end” /> |
| ODF Sheet | <style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000”/> | <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end”/> |
| ODF Presentation | <style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000”/> | <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end”/> |
to clarify: i’m not sad because of the file-format. while the format is not perfect, imho it’s still much more open, than their binary-formats. the problem is ISO, not Microsoft. the fact that ISO accepted such a mess as a standard.
to read more, try http://www.noooxml.org/ or just google for OOXML or for autoSpaceLikeWord95.