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Alex Brown: OOXML is like a baroque castle with secret passages and crumbling towers

By Pamela Jones et al.

Here's a quotation for the ages, from an Alex Brown comment on Andrew Updegrove's Standards Blog (scroll down) asking Brown if he'd agree that ODF was cleaner than OOXML:

"I'd go with that. I think ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF 1.0) can be compared to a neat house built on good foundations which is not finished; 29500 (OOXML) is a baroque cliffside castle replete with toppling towers, secret passages and ghosts: it is all too finished."

Now he tells us. Still, better late than never. And I couldn't have put it better myself. But if it's that bad, why is it an ISO standard? A standard with secret passages is a standard no one can implement unless they have a map and the keys. We don't have either. Only Microsoft does. Thanks, ISO, for this little anticompetitive joke.

Meanwhile, the protests are not stopping, despite the rather cynical call for peace and an end to "personal attacks" from 30 of the attendees of the Microsoft-heavy SC34 committee that met in Oslo recently to try to figure out what in the world to do next with OOXML. Now that it's a "standard", somebody has to scrape off all the goo and make it actually work. I call it cynical, because as far as I'm concerned, OOXML is itself an attack on ODF. It seems to me to have no other purpose. Well. The ghosts.

Full post as published by Groklaw on April 14, 2008 (boomark / email).