After being told by European Union in 2004 to standardise and open their Office format or else face the risk of being kicked in the butt, Micro$oft decided and went ahead with a new standard which is supposed to be one for its upcoming Office releases. But instead of following the already approved ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications), Micro$oft decided to create one more standard called Office OpenXML and by questionable tactics got it to the approving body and got it nearly approved till India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela protested. It still pending review and there is a fear that it might approved. The reasons why it should not be approved are

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
5. There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;
6. This format conflicts with existing ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids any date before the year 1900: such bugs affect the OOXML specification as well as software applications like Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007.
8. This standard proposal was not created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

Because of the reasons stated above, there has been a heavy opposition to this format and a online petition to prevent this standard getting approved is available online.  So please visit it and make your voice heard.

Also check out the technical comparison available at ODF Fellowship.

Source : [No OOXML, D Wheeler]

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