Microsoft Office documents: opened by standard, closed by complexity?

Stuart Corner
Monday, 11 December 2006 02:11

Your IT - Home IT

European standards body ECMA has accepted Microsoft's Open XML document format as a standard, supposedly paying the way for other software developers to embrace Office documents in their products, but critics say Open XML's complexity will be a major barrier to its uptake.

Open XML is the format used in the latest version of Microsoft's Office suite - Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.  ECMA will now submit Open XML to the International Standards Organisation for approval as an ISO standard. Microsoft has moved to get Open XML accepted as an international standard because of increasing reluctance by government bodies to be locked in to proprietary standards has lead to the emergence of the Open Document Format (ODF), which has been accepted as an international standard.

The International Herald Tribune reported that only one of ECMA's 21 members, IBM had voted against the proposal, and it quoted Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, calling the Open XML formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for ODF.

In its press release announcing acceptance of Open XML by ECMA, Microsoft bragged that "The ECMA committee TC45 made significant changes to the specification and also produced more than 6,000 pages of documentation on the formats to help developers get predictable results with the formats, whether they wanted to take advantage of a few specific features or the full technology set of the formats."

Sutor, in his personal blog in October, asked: "Who will implement Open XML correctly and fully? Maybe Microsoft. Why? Since it is essentially a dump into XML of all the data needed for all the functionality of their Office products and since those products are proprietary, only they will understand any nuances that go beyond the spec.