
For your OOXML Conspiracy Theories - Miguel de Icaza - jsulak
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Dec-21.html
======
zdw
While he's right about a lot of things (especially that the ODF people could
have spent more time on their spec rather than fighting against OOXML), it
doesn't change the fact that even the most recent versions of MS's own
products will generate files that:

1\. Don't validate against the OOXML schema.

2\. Contain large blobs of encoded binary data from previous versions of MS
Office in the XML files.

For this reason alone (that the spec isn't followed correctly), I still prefer
ODF.

~~~
tzs
ODF word processors have similar validation problems:
[http://idippedut.dk/post.aspx?id=b7af4c8c-c081-4389-8c46-a3f...](http://idippedut.dk/post.aspx?id=b7af4c8c-c081-4389-8c46-a3fe17bd0cca)

~~~
zdw
I'm not surprised at that.

Honestly, I'd love to have all devel builds of any software that writes XML as
output have to validate that XML against the schema before it's written to a
file, and have passing that test be part of the the acceptance criteria for
the build.

This isn't hard to automate - it's very basic test driven design stuff. I do
the above in my own code, and all it takes is a single extra line...

------
ryanackley
I was one of the first people to reverse-engineer the binary Word file format
and was one of the early contributors to POI.I've spent a career writing code
against various file formats.

Unfortunately, most of the comments here are not based on first-hand technical
knowledge. How many of you have tried to code against the OOXML spec? I have.
It's pretty good.

Most people in the community of "people actually doing stuff in this area",
which Miguel is a part of, feel like Microsoft is acting in good faith. See
<http://www.opensource.org/node/351>.

------
burgerbrain
He can slam Groklaw as much as he wants, but I've still never seen them offer
anything other than rational and backed interpretations of the presented
facts.

I particularly love how he thinks ISO approval of OOXML is some sort of silver
bullet against all allegations against him. _Everybody_ in the know is very
aware of the nastiness that went on with that. And as zdw in this discussion
notes, it's ISO approval doesn't mean jack in reality.

~~~
bad_user

          ISO approval doesn't mean jack in reality
    

If Java was an ISO standard, Harmony would have been a legal Java
implementation, Apache's vote would have meant something, supersets of the
standard would have been allowed. This and the fact that the standard would
have been kept small to accommodate all versions of Java, and the lawsuit
against Google's Android wouldn't have happened.

As it is right now, Microsoft cannot sue alternative implementations of their
ECMA standards for .NET. They can only do that for parts that aren't in those
standards.

Also, in reality many governments like ISO standards.

    
    
         Groklaw ... I've still never seen them offer anything other
         than rational and backed interpretations of the presented facts
    

I would take unbiased over apparently_rational_but_filled_with_emotions any
day of the week.

~~~
burgerbrain
ISO approval doesn't mean jack because even if you follow the standard, you
won't be able to load supposedly standardized documents that were generated by
Microsoft's software 99/100 times.

~~~
bad_user
This is just FUD ... I never had problems opening MS Office documents in
OpenOffice, except a few problems here and there with formatting: but it's not
like browsers do any better.

And I'm talking about reverse engineered formats here, for which there was no
documentation, ISO or otherwise.

Also, have you ever implemented an ISO standard to be able to speak about it?
I have.

------
voxcogitatio
Icaza has a long history of being a microsoft shill, I can't say I'm suprised
to see him leap to his master's defence once again.

~~~
tzs
Then you should have no trouble naming three incidents from that "long
history".

~~~
burgerbrain
There have been a seemingly endless stream of _incidences_ of him shilling for
MS, going on for several years now. The two most common _themes_ of shilling
are trying to push Mono as a viable linux technology, trying to push Mono as a
dependancy on common linux systems, and shilling for OOXML like you see here.

Another (slightly less common) theme is his ad hominem attacks on [F]OSS
figures/organizations/supporters such as the FSF and Groklaw, like you see
here.

He's been at this for years, it's no stretch of an imagination to call it a
"long history".

~~~
tzs
Mono is viable Linux technology. You probably should learn what the word
"shill" means before continuing further.

While investigating the word "shill", a refresher on "ad hominem" would help,
too, as the submitted blog entry is not an example of an ad hominem.

