Bob Sutor makes a good observation. As we mentioned 3 times in the past fortnight [1, 2, 3], ECMA-OOXML is being warped in all sorts of radical ways. This pretty much makes an admission that MS-OOXML is broken beyond repair.

There were some stories in the blogosphere over the holidays saying that Microsoft was telling some national standards bodies that it was willing to deprecate portions of OOXML in order to satisfy some of the thousands of technical criticisms of OOXML in the JTC1 standards process.

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It’s not uncommon to see some deprecations in versions 2.0 and higher of standards. It could mean one or more of

* “whoops, we goofed” * “there was a problem with what we said to do” * “we’ve come up with a better way of doing that” * “you really don’t want to be doing that”

Remember that no matter how much cruft, binary extensions, operating system-specific appendages and serious bugs Microsoft tries to hide from an already-zombified ISO, OOXML is Microsoft Office, which will not (never ever!) comply with the ECMA specification. As the above shows, Microsoft's prophecy that Office might deviate from the semi-documented OOXML is already materialising.

OOXML is expensive to adopt, it is always paid for, and it is totally insane. That pretty much tells you something about those who vote in favour of OOXML. Additionally, Novell, among others, was virtually bribed to support OOXML, i.e. suppress adoption of the real standard -- ODF. ⬆