Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd Apr 2008 17:54 UTC, submitted by Almafeta
"Microsoft's embattled Office Open XML document format received ISO fast-track approval after receiving support from approximately 86 percent of the national bodies that participated in the vote. ISO approval will be broadly perceived as a sign of validation for the document format which has received widespread criticism from technical experts and standards advocacy groups."
Thread beginning with comment 307913
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
An ISO standard doesn't prevent "undocumented extensions", as you call them. ISO standards just require *documented* features will be compliant.
You cannot prevent any company to add its own extensions to a format in order to support features others don't support and what standard didn't include. If formats are open and smart, they will include a way to add custom extensions without the need to mess with data.
The important thing is they don't introduce any incompatibility regarding the standard part of the specs. As I said, I don't believe they will just because now that's not in their interests.
Member since:
2007-03-06
MSOffice 2007 docx format adds undocumented extensions to the Ecma 376 OOXML. As such I don't think it can really be considered compliant, let alone being a reference implementation (which leaves us with 0 of those).