Immature file formats should be kept inside

Despite recent ISO approval, Microsoft’s Office XML formats are not yet ready for use beyond the firewall

“Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.” That was the mantra of the late Jon Postel, the first editor of the RFC documents that define the internet.

Now consider the shameful history of the ongoing war over office document file formats, marked by the ISO standardisation of the Open Document Format (ODF) in 2006, and its approval of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format in early April.

Why shameful? It is not because Microsoft’s file standard is vile; I have read much of it and it is not as bad as its detractors make out, especially when you consider its purpose. I also respect ISO’s integrity, despite accusations of foul play.

My perception is that neither side were averse to gamesmanship; but I also saw the intense scrutiny and effort put into the standardisation process by experts in the field. What is shameful is the way in which this standard has been prematurely foisted on users by default.

The irony is that until recently Microsoft had no desire to standardise Office XML. In February 2005, I asked Jean Paoli, Microsoft’s XML Architect, why the company did not submit what was then known as WordProcessingML and SpreadsheetML to a standards body.

“We need to maintain this damn thing,” he told me. “We have 1,500 tags. Who is going to maintain that? A standards body? It doesn’t know what is inside of Word. That’s the problem.”

At the time I was sceptical. I figured that Microsoft simply saw more advantage in keeping the world hooked on its proprietary formats than in making a standard to which others could conform. The company soon changed its mind. Large customers, primarily those in government or in education, started muttering about mandating “standard” formats. Getting the Office formats stand ardised then became a matter of commercial necessity.

At the same time, every open-source advocate and rival vendor smelt blood. This could have been the lever with which to weaken Microsoft’s hold on the enterprise. In the circumstances, discussion of the merits of Microsoft’s Office XML had little chance of being objective.

Storing office documents in XML is a great idea, especially in the web era. The key advantage is that applications can both parse and create them more easily. It promises an end to the madness of automating Microsoft Office with macros just to generate documents.

Nevertheless, I believe it was wrong of Microsoft to configure Office 2007 to save documents into its new XML formats by default. It breached Postel’s principle, because users now unwittingly email these documents to others, not realising how difficult they might be for the recipient to read. At the time Microsoft had no solution for Apple users, for example, even those with the latest Mac version of Microsoft Office. The old binary formats may lack the XML fairy dust, but they are thoroughly understood even in the open-source world.

I was reminded of the immaturity of the standard when evaluating Corel’s new WordPerfect X4 suite, which promises compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 files and ODF. My brief tests showed it to be disappointing, scrambling OOXML documents somewhat, and crashing completely on my sample ODF file.

Standardisation of Microsoft Office XML is a good thing, but until the formats can be easily, reliably and freely read using any mainstream operating system, documents in this format are not suitable for widespread document interchange. Not everyone can read them; and the many changes made during the ISO process are not yet reflected in Office 2007 itself. The solution is simple: if you use Microsoft’s latest suite, save to the old format if you are going to send documents out.