Why stop at adversarial interoperability? When we're talking about monopolistic participants, why not compel them to open the network and standards that are serving as a barrier to entry. We take for granted that a Verizon phone can call a T-Mobile user; the situation in social media in particular, as well as .doc/.docx, is archaic.
I was under the impression that the docx format is a published standard, first under ECMA-376 then ISO/IEC 29500:2008. Microsoft has also promised to not enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt those standards.
Strange that they can call it a standard yet continue to include non-agreed-upon extensions. At some point it becomes false advertising, unless they fork it under a new MIME type
I believe a company has a right to support backwards compatibility for file formats. If they propose a standard and the outcome of the standards work prevents their supporting backwards compatibility (in both directions), I’d rather they support their customers (and their data/files), document their extension use, even at the expense of pure standards implementations not being able to read those files.
When I had a project to render docx files, I had to refer the ECMA pdfs which were tens of thousands of pages long and use that only to supplement reverse engineering Word documents. I also remember something hardly decclarative: if a picture was angled, I had to calculate the container boundaries and store it redundantly in the container.
>Microsoft has also promised to not enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt those standards.
Why would any sane person trust a corporation's word, let alone Microsoft's?
Corporations are not your friend and will happily fuck you over for a few percentage points' increase in shareholder returns.
Have we forgotten embrace, extend, extinguish already?
It's not like it's a pinky promise. They published an irrevocable declaration, which if they tried to walk back would undoubtedly be problematic at a minimum when it went to court.
