I noticed a curious argument in Jonathan Corbet’s LWN article “Supporting OOXML in LibreOffice” (behind a pay wall). Why should we support OOXML? …as has been pointed out in the discussion, Microsoft will, someday, phase out support for its (equally proprietary) DOC format, leaving OOXML as the only real option for document interchange. There appears […]
OOXML
The value of restricting choice
The language game Microsoft’s talking points go something like this (summarized in my words): If you adopt ODF instead of OOXML then you “restrict choice”. Why would you want to do that? You’re in favor of openness and competition, right? So naturally, you should favor choice. You can see a hundreds of variations on this […]
ISO/IEC JTC1 Revises Directives, Addresses OOXML Abuses
On July 1st, 2010 a new set of rules (directives) took effect in ISO/IEC JTC1 including new processing and voting rules for JTC1 Fast Track submissions. If these rules had been in effect back in 2007, OOXML would have died after its initial ballot. Let’s take a look at some of the specific changes that […]
Microsoft Office document corruption: Testing the OOXML claims
Summary In this post I take a look at Microsoft’s claims for robust data recovery with their Office Open XML (OOXML) file format. I show the results of an experiment, where I introduce random errors into documents and observe whether word processors can recover from these errors. Based on these result, I estimate data recovery […]
Asking the right questions about Office 2010’s OOXML support
There is more OOXML controversy in the news, this time in Denmark. I don’t claim to understand all the nuances of the accusations, since I don’t read Danish, and Google Translates makes it sound at times like a discussion about loaves of rye bread or something, but the gist of it, as I can surmise […]