| > A good starting document is "Can Other Vendors Implement Microsoft's Office Open XML?" http://web.archive.org/web/20070912014933/http://www.hollowa.... Then let's start there! Let's start with the first section about Word Processing, in fact: ```
1.1. Historical Compatibility OOXML contains compatibility markers to describe older legacy documents, their quirks and processing models. These compatibility features mark behaviours that software must implement to correctly display and process the majority of documents in existence. The "Compability Settings" WordProcessingML4 section within OOXML does not provide for repeatable practices. While it provides Microsoft the ability to store information related to various behaviors in their legacy file formats, the specification merely lists the names of these settings without proper definitions. An OOXML-consuming application, presented with a document using these attributes, will be unable to interpret them properly and render the page in a high-fidelity manner. Further, since these attributes are merely listed but not defined, the ability to practice the benefit of being “fully compatible with the large existing investments in Microsoft Office documents” (the goal of OOXML according to its authors) is consequently reserved for Microsoft alone. These behaviours such as “autoSpaceLikeWord95” , “useWord97LineBreakRules” and “useWord2002TableStyleRules” are not defined. As OOXML repeatedly states, [t]o faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. These processing hints in the proposed standard depend on undisclosed information, and therefore other vendors cannot correctly process historical documents using OOXML.
This lack of specification has significant implications for the New Zealand public sector organisations operating under the Public Records Act who are seeking to preserve documents of their records in a readable electronic form.
``` I think that rather supports the claim that backwards compatibility is a problem for OOXML. I see no claim in there about any deliberate obfuscation. |