Office applications Toolkit

Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: Albert (Thursday 28 February 2008, 6:43 PM)

Actually MS Office 2007 complies with official Ecma standard

Currently there is only one official open standard version of OOXML and that is the Ecma 376 standard.
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm
MS Office 2007 uses that version and validates on those XML schema's .
Soon there might be a new version of ISO OOXML and that is then likely to become the new Ecma 376 version as well. The ISO version will probably become Ecma 376 v1.1.

You might not have noticed but ODF actually has
ODF 1.0,
ODF ISO,
ODF v1.0 SE (second edition)
ODF v1.1
ODF v1.2 (in draft phase)
Amazingly the main OOo implemantation does not fully support ANY of these ODF versions.
Also the current changes planned for v1.2 of ODF are MUCH MUCH MUCH more drastic and complex changes to the format than the total of changes that come out of the ISO standardization proces for OOXML.

To call the state of OOXML "a state of flux" might be correct but in comparison the state of ODF might translate as "a state of chaos".

An important reason for this is that for ODF OASIS is doing maintenance on the standard. For OOXML the maintenance will be done by Ecma and ISO together. So the Ecma and ISO version will be the same. The OASIS version actually are not the same as the ISO version because OASIS is not submitting all version to ISO. So at the moment not only OOo but actually most ODF implementations are NOT ISO ODF version compliant.

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