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Maybe you should know your history before you go blabbing that you know everything.

Never did any such thing.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/05/0041212

From the article - "so not only must an interoperable OOXML implementation first acquire and reverse-engineer a 14-year old version of Microsoft Word, it must also do the same thing with a 16-year old version of WordPerfect." referring to suppressTopSpacingWP

How you have come to believe that is relevant to what I had written is anyone's guess. Just because Microsoft have some WP elements and behaviour dumped into their own format as a result of some long lost (and now pointless) older support, it doesn't mean that they support WordPerfect today.

I think you need to read what you've quoted. The paragraph you are quoting is asking what on Earth the point is of referring to unspecified WordPerfect behaviour from 16 years ago and replicating it, rather than converting it over. I quite agree.

Also lets not forget - "Possible legacy MS Office rendering compatibility issues are identified using (deprecated) tags: For example, book 4 section 2.15.3.6, autoSpaceLikeWord95, book 4 section 2.15.3.31, lineWrapLikeWord6."

Yer. And? What the hell is that doing in there? It is up to an application to work out what to do with that in terms of converting it to a new format. Additionally, those tags mean nothing simply because their behaviour isn't defined.

I thought ODF was going to be the savior where all these documents could be suddenly read and available to the masses?

No. Whether you use ODF or OOXML, it's the job of these things called office suites to convert the old format into the new. Quite what universe you or Microsoft live in where a new format can automatically convert older formats itself isn't quite clear.

All that you need is a translator to convert it in to OOXML.

Ergo, it isn't backwards compatible with older formats, therefore the Microsoft Office specific elements to OOXML are pointless. All I need is a translator to convert a document to ODF. So what?

In ODF most of these legacy documents are going to have to be totally rewritten to perserve the formatting that was originally available.

No. There's simply no reason why several thousand elements from the older Microsoft Office binary format needed to be dumped into an open format to preserve some form of non-existant backward compatibility. In reality, it's exactly the same format in different packaging with all the same old problems.

It only looks forward and says forget about everything that came before me.

That's because it's a new format.

And forgetting about your past is a luxury that a document format does not have.

Yes it does have that luxury, because it is the applications that do the heavy lifting of conversion, and not the formats. There's simply no reason for a new format to have several thousand elements from an old format dumped, literally, into it from an older binary format in the name of backwards compatibility.

You make the mistake that even Microsoft employees have made, which is to view the format and the application as the same thing. Easy mistake to make I suppose.

The famous saying comes to mind, "those who don't know history or doomed to relive it." or in this case only a bunch of purist evangelical fanatics

I refer you to your first comment above:

Blah, Blah, Blah
Try the Cherry flavor.

because the masses still have documents that are 5+ years old in their original format.

So what? You get an office suite that can open your older Microsoft Office documents and then 'Save As...' ODF. That has absolutely nothing to do with the new format that you've created, and there's simply no reason for your new format to simply dump every element of the old format into a new one just because it uses XML. In reality, it's still exactly the same format!

Mind you, that was the whole point. Microsoft just decided to change the Emperor's clothing just so they could say "Oh, it's XML!"