[OpenISO] Fwd: The Deprecated "Smoke Screen" of MS Office Open XML (OOXML)

[Norbert Bollow]

Henrik Sundberg <storangen at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2007/12/28, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>:
> > However I don't think that it's justified to also attack the people
> > who are members of ECMA TC45 simply because their employer is
> > interested in having a public-domain document with useful
> > interoperability information.  I think that the move to declare that
> > revulsive stuff "deprecated" comes from this kind of people.
> 
> But isn't this a smoke screen anyway?
> Microsoft will use the deprecated stuff.

Calling it "deprecated" with Microsoft's agreement is a kind of
promise that Microsoft would ensure that at least starting with
the next major release of their software, at least new documents
don't use those features.

The practical value of this is a somewhat increased likelihood
of Microsoft actually doing that (because they're going to get
negative publicity if they continue using officially deprecated
features of their own format), plus a significantly increased
likelihood of other software authors not using the deprecated
features but rather the recommended alternative methods with
better interoperability properties.

> No one else will be able to render the documents correctly.

Whether what one can do with a document is good enough for a
given purpose, that depends on the purpose.  For some purposes,
what can be done with the available interoperability information
is good enough, for other purposes it isn't.  Every small
concession from Microsoft at least potentially increases the set of
use cases in which real-world businesses no longer feel a need to
effectively enforce a (written or unwritten) "Microsoft Office only"
policy, and is therefore worth fighting for.

I view these steps of deprecation as such small concessions.
They don't change the big picture that OOXML clearly doesn't
deserve to be called a "standard", but I view them as something
positive anyway.

> As I understand it, we are worse off than when reverse engineering the
> binary formats.

How so?

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org