Thursday, April 03, 2008
ISO/IEC DIS 29500
It's now official. Office Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC International Standard, ISO/IEC DIS 29500.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
OOXML and scripting
Rob Weir argues that scripting is inadequately defined in Office Open XML. Because of the vagueness of the specification, he argues, "not only is it impossible to have cross-platform interoperability of this feature, it is not even possible to implement a reasonable security policy to detect, scan or block macros. Even the location of the macro is outside the scope of the standard."
It's likely that Brian Jones will have a rejoinder. I'll link to it when it's available.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
British Library archives Microsoft formats
Here's a site for formats which I hadn't spotted before: the British Library has provided an online archive of Microsoft Office formats. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Office Drawing, Windows Compound Binary File, Windows Metafile, and Windows Ink Serialized Format.
Thanks to Brian Jones for the link.
Labels: Microsoft
Friday, February 08, 2008
A plea for standardization
"Open XML" sounds like something which has to do with XML as such, and is too easy to confuse with any number of other open XML-based projects.
"Open Office XML" is even more confusing, since it's similar in name to OpenOffice.org XML, which was the predecessor of ODF and thus actually its competitor.
In the past I've been inconsistent in my terminology, but I pledge henceforth to call Microsoft's XML-based format for its Office products Office Open XML or OOXML, and to eschew those other names, and I ask everyone else to do the same. Not that it would make a dent in the world if everybody reading this blog immediately agrees, but every little step helps.
If you look closely at the blogroll in the sidebar, you'll notice I've made a little annotation to one blog name in the spirit of this pledge.
