
Microsoft Office 2007 fails OOXML conformance tests with 122,000 errors - naish
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080421091129596
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tlrobinson
OOXML is truly an awful format. I've been neck deep in the 6000 page spec for
the last couple months implementing it for our product.

There's fun things like trying to remember what nvPicPr, spPr, cNvPicPr,
cNvPr, nvPr, cNvSpPr each mean, and quirks like different uses of the same tag
being in different namespaces for no apparent reason
(<http://openxmldeveloper.org/forums/thread/2931.aspx>)

The sad/scary thing is, even if ISO manages to beat OOXML into a half decent
format, Office 2007 already implements this pseudo-OOXML format, which will
become the de facto standard. If you want to work with the millions of copies
of Office 2007 and the billions of fake-OOXML documents already out there,
you'll have to develop specifically for it, not the ISO approved spec. Yet
Microsoft will claim they're the same.

It will be like IE all over again. It's a huge mess.

