Microsoft has committed to implement the ISO standard edition of Office Open XML (OOXML), as approved in November 2008. It has been expected that this would happen in Office 2010.
Office 2010 will be launched in a month, but tests of the beta version shows that OOXML support is in place. That is, there is support for the original ECMA version, but this was initially rejected by ISO. Only when a number of changes were in place, the OOXML approved as an ISO standard (ISO / IEC 29500).
This writes Alex Brown, leader of the ISO subcommittee for information descriptive language (WG 1) in a blog post.
- Preview edition of Office 2010 does not support the approved Strict variant of OOXML, but the same format as the global community rejected in September 2007, and then set not to be used in new documents - Transitional variant. Microsoft acts as if the JTC 1 standardization process never took place, and using technologies that VML in a new product that even the standard text described as undesirable and included only for historical reasons, writes Brown.
He points out that Office 2010 Beta fails even in simple, named validation tests, and that this is primarily due to the non-corrected problems in the text. Brown believes it is worrying that amateurs first tests reveal problems that Microsoft's quality assurance process has overlooked.
Brown writes also that it seems that ECMA has completed all proactive efforts to improve the text and instead let a handful of national experts struggle with this activity.
- It seems to me that Microsoft / Ecma believes that 95 percent of the work is done to ensure that standards are useful and relevant. But when you look at the text, I consider it more like 95 percent remains to be done, since it is still full of defects, writes Brown.
Yesterday was Microsoft's Doug Mahugh with a response to Brown's post. In short, he writes that full support for OOXML Strict will come later than Office 15, i.e. the version after Office 2010. Based on Microsoft's usual release rate may be as much as three years ahead.
According Mahugh completed the planning of Microsoft Office 2010 before working with the ISO version of OOXML was completed. The company will subsequently still have options to implement full support for ISO / IEC 29500 Transitional and read support for Strict. The support for reading Strict-based files will also be made available for Office 2007 SP2 through an addition.
