With the semi-recent approval of OOXML by the ISO, an issue has come up over how well Office 2007 implements Microsoft’s own standard, OOXML. Griffin Brown tested the compatibility of the latest Office 2007 with the latest OOXML standard and found that the results were less than perfect. My first reaction, of course, was outrage. How on earth are competitors supposed to implement Microsoft’s “open” standard if even Microsoft itself cannot implement it correctly? As I read through the original post, though, I believe I may have been too fast to jump to that conclusion.

Griffin Brown tested Office 2007 against two versions of the OOXML standard - the transitional and strict versions. When tested against the transitional version (a less strict version) Office 2007’s implementation returned 84 error messages, which Brown calls “relatively few.” Many of the errors, he says, are “all of the same type.” Additionally, in the example he gives, the Office 2007 version uses “on,” which was used in a previous version of OOXML, instead of “true,” which is the current version. Judge for yourself, but this sort of thing seems OK to me as long as Microsoft corrects it soon.

When Brown tested Office 2007’s implementation against the strict version, however, it received many more errors. Apparently, 17MB (around 122,000) of error messages were output. This seems much less justifiable to me. Seriously, 17MB???

Before I make a judgment, I want to know two things:

1. Which version is more important, transitional or strict? Groklaw says about the transitional version that it is “one no one on the planet will be using,” but this statement is not backed up or justified.
2. How common is it to have errors in format implementations? For example, if most implementations by programs such as OpenOffice are perfect, Microsoft’s implementation would seem inexcusable. On the other hand, if almost all implementations contain many errors, Microsoft’s implemenation makes more sense.

There is, of course, an argument that those questions don’t matter and, since OOXML is Microsoft’s own format, it should be implemented perfectly. This, however, seems unfair to me. Instead, I will wait to see how others react to Brown’s findings. I just want to make the point that, no matter how many other flaws OOXML has, Brown’s findings might not be as damning as they seem.

Note: I want to make it very clear that I am not excusing Microsoft, I am simply waiting for more information before judging.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.