Microsoft’s Document “Standard” Isn’t
It’s not a standard, argues Rob Weir, because it is carefully designed to favor Microsoft Office to the exclusion of other programs.
MSOOXML, the company’s new office document format, was created to deliberately confuse the marketplace that is starting to gravitate toward OpenDocument Format, which is a true open file format. By calling their closed format “open,” Microsoft clearly hopes to siphon away support from ODF. And by MS’ pretending it is open, those who don’t watch closely (most everybody), will fall into the trap, where they’ll be locked into a new generation of expensive proprietary programs.
Weir spells it out: “This is a running criticism I have of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML). It has been narrowly crafted to accommodate a single vendor’s applications. Its extreme length (over 6,000 pages) stems from it having detailed every wart of MS Office in an inextensible, inflexible manner. This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.”
The problem is that in many instances the spec for MSOOXML reads along the lines of “do this like Word 95 did it,” without explaining how Word 95 did it!
Weir writes, “So I’d argue that these legacy tags are some of the most important ones in the specification. But they remain undefined, and by this ruse Microsoft has arranged things so that their lock on legacy documents extends to even when those legacy documents are converted to OOXML. We are ruled by the dead hand of the past.”
The solution is straightforward–don’t use this fake standard, use ODF instead.