Summary: Crimes aside, the obvious technical pitfalls of OOXML are made more apparent, whereas ODF proves to be future-proof because of its reuse of existing standards

A FEW YEARS after Microsoft corrupted national bodies and corrupted ISO, the convicted monopolist begs for people to forget the past and actually believe that OOXML is a standard.

Not only is OOXML not a standard, it is hardly even a format because nobody has ever implemented it. It's just some words on paper with errata weighing thousands of pages (and nobody bothering with them). OOXML is a great example... of why Microsoft is still a criminal company. Those who do not understand why this is so probably ought to look back because it's well documented. There is nothing Microsoft won't do for its stagnating cash cow, even if it's lying, intimidating, throwing people out of their jobs, hiring AstroTurfers, and bribing many people.

Stéphane Rodriguez, who is intimately familiar with the mechanics of Microsoft Office, has published a long post titled "The OOXML interoperability scam," wherein he gives detailed examples.

Every time the Microsoft Office team pushes a comment on the wire, there is another pledge for interoperability. It has been so common for the last few years that if you haven't actually watched what it might mean, pretty much OOXML is synonym with interoperability.

Of course, it does not matter that the word interoperability alone does not mean anything. That is why Microsoft uses it so much. You can pretty much put an interoperability label to anything as long as it is not accurately defined. Does it mean document-level interoperability? Application-level interoperability? Or, perhaps is it just Microsoft-only interoperability (a good guess!)?

The pledge for interoperability cannot possibly mean document-level interoperability since we are not there : OOXML is full of non-XML streams, barely defined at all (the official papers lack everything related to international features, and that is just one example), so that ends any serious discussion precociously. In the remainder of his article, I'll be taking a look at application-level interoperability, in case Microsoft means that.

[...]

Simple tests like this leave me a bit speechless when you see that Microsoft Office is supposed to be the rolls royce of Office programs in the world, the de facto standard. And in fact it's just crap. On the contrary OpenOffice, the free suite, is actually a more serious product when it comes to application-level interoperability. This had to be said...

Compare the proprietary mishmash that OOXML contains to something more elegant like ODF, which actually reuses international standards like SVG, MathML, and doesn't have pseudo-leap years to contain one program's bugs inside formal specifications. Here is a new post about that:

After a few posts around the net talking about the now 5 years of ODF. I want to talk about what I have lately been talking on what would this new web era can bring to ODF. For the most part of those 5 years I have heard and listen to talks about the future of ODF, it’s integration with semantic web. It’s advantages over security, digital signatures, third party applications and further development within OpenOffice.org.

We are now going into the era of HTML5 which is supposed to come with so much more advantages for the web and ODF would find a new niche were to grow and expand. So HTML5 have been talked about producing new technical advantages such as:

* Geodata * Storage API * Simple scripting (no namespaces) * Audio and Video * Interactivity like Drag and Drop

[...]

So why we keep comparing ODF and whatever happens on the web? Certainly ODF has always done this, with standards like Dublin-core, MathML, and other standards. Microformats, and Geo locational web can certainly be in that train of thought. If the applications support it or not, let’s be clear, ODF should mark the leadership, and the apps should follow, so is meant to be that the apps should catch up to ODF and not the other way around.

This ought to also address the CDF noise from the OpenDocument Foundation.

The links above were found in the blog of Rob Weir, who also included this link about Free/Open Source software in government [PDF] and an interview with himself.

Last month OASIS ODF Adoption TC member Rob Weir sat down with Svante Schubert at the Plugfest in Granada to discuss a range of topics, including ODF 1.2's RDF-based metadata and Svante's work on ODFDOM. You can listen to this interview in our first episode of the ODF Podcast.

IBM has done a lot to help ODF. It's time for IBM to also bury software patents, not promote them. And we know, we know... it's not Weir's department, so to speak. Bob Sutor deletes comments that ask about it while others in IBM ignore E-mails that inquire about software patents. ⬆