Office OpenXML Gets Approval

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 08:29:46AM -0400, John Myshrall wrote:
> Well deep pockets can buy you anything. BTW Canada voted no with 
> comments. There was a Microsoft representative in the Canadian delegation.
> 
> There are investigations going on in various countries due to voting 
> irregularities.
> 
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080401133818372
> 
> http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123

Personally I will treat this as yet another ISO standard that might as
well not exist.

Now I would have had no problem with Microsoft making a standard for
document formats if they had even tried to do a good job.  Including all
their old bugs in a file format is just pathetic.  If you are making a
new format, make it simple and ellegant.  They did the exact opposite.
They put loads of old legacy garbage in there that should have been
removed.  You can't keep supporting your old bugs forever just because
you are too lazy to write a proper converter.  One of these days it
would be nice to have a spreadsheet that does get leap years correct.
And 6000 pages of documentation for the spec including references to
various "windows functions" for parts of the implementation is just
insane.  How can you implement and varify compliance with such a mess?

I think standards should be based on best practices, and whatever
microsoft has been doing with office's file formats for many years is
far from the best they could have done, it just happens to have been the
easiest once they already screwed it up to begin with.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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