Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 23 April 2008 15:54
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Doug Mahugh, author of the “Open XML file formats”
blog hosted at Microsoft’s MSDN had a look at Brown’s testing.
Mahugh said that: “Office 2007 was designed to be highly compatible with existing documents, so it uses features of Open XML that provide backward compatibility, including many of the elements and attributes that were moved to "transitional status" as a result of the BRM. So the test of strict conformance, although interesting, is a bit abstract: it's testing whether a document conforms to a subset of the spec that was defined after the document was created.”
Mahugh continued that: “The second number [the transitional test] is the more meaningful one. Those are places in the test document where something is done in a way that doesn't match the final IS29500 spec. Alex provides one specific example, to show the types of changes caught by that test: an attribute with a value of "on" that should say "true" instead, due to "one of the many tidying-up exercises performed at the BRM."
“To put that second number in perspective, there were 84 total errors in a document of 60,299,969 characters, which works out to about one error in every 700,000 characters or so”, said Mahugh.
Mahugh then noted that: “Alex's research is an interesting first step in understanding conformance for IS29500. Another interesting step may eventually appear in the form of a test suite, a suggestion from Italy and other countries. The existence of such a test would be useful as more implementations become available.”
An analysis by Groklaw “Erwan” finds the
situation “Hilarious”.
Erwan said that: " ‘17MB (around 122,000) of invalidity messages’ in the strict test; less in a ‘transitional’ model, meaning one no one on the planet will be using, since the entire point of the BRM was to fix stuff and none of those fixes are yet incorporated into Microsoft Office 2007.”
Erwan continued: “And by the time they are, will Microsoft Office 2007 have moved on, so we can continue to play catch up with Microsoft forever and a day? Isn't that what standards are supposed to prevent?”
Please read onto page 3, where we're told "not to hold our breath"...
