I’ve read a few times that Microsoft’s OOXML format is unnecessarily complicated and convoluted with a very long documentation, aiming to make its adoption difficult and enhancing Microsoft’s monopoly. Here’s an example.
However, I’ve recently read this and this article by the founder of GNOME (and Gnumetric, their spreadsheet app) and I’m not sure what to think anymore.
I’ve also seen some people say that this complexity might be due to backward compatibility with Microsoft’s older format.
Thoughts?
Some excerpts:
A common objection to OOXML is that the specification is “too big”, that 6,000 pages is a bit too much for a specification and that this would prevent third parties from implementing support for the standard.
Considering that for years we, the open source community, have been trying to extract as much information about protocols and file formats from Microsoft, this is actually a good thing.
To build a spreadsheet program based on ODF you would have to resort to an existing implementation source code (OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric) or you would have to resort to Microsoft’s public documentation or ironically to the OOXML specification.
Some of the objections over OOXML are based around the fact that it does not use existing ISO standards for some of the bits in it. They list 7 ISO standards that OOXML does not use: 8601 dates and times; 639 names and languages; 8632 computer graphics and metafiles; 10118-3 cryptography as well as a handful of W3C standards.
By comparison, ODF only references three ISO standards: Relax NG (OOXML also references this one), 639 (language codes) and 3166 (country codes).
Not only it is demanded that OOXML abide by more standards than ISO’s own ODF does, but also that the format used for metafiles from 1999 be used. It seems like it would prevent some nice features developed in the last 8 years for no other reason than “there was a standard for it”.