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Microsoft Office 2007 Fails OOXML Conformance Tests, Alex Brown Admits, Hopes For the Best

By Pamela Jones et al.

This takes the cake. Alex Brown has just admitted on his Griffin Brown blog and further to ZDNET UK's Peter Judge that Microsoft Office 2007 has failed two OOXML conformance tests he ran. First ZDNET:

In a blog posting this week, Alex Brown, leader of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) group in charge of maintaining the Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, revealed that Microsoft Office 2007 documents do not meet the latest specifications of the ISO OOXML draft standard.

"Word documents generated by today's version of Microsoft Office 2007 do not conform to ISO/IEC 29500," said Brown in a blog post recounting the process of testing a document against the "strict" and "transitional" schema defined in the standard.

Color me surprised. Say, France, you might want to slow down adding this "standard" to your list until it actually works. All you folks who voted for it need to tell us why you accepted it before it was done. Because what this means is that OOXML was just approved as an ISO standard, on the allegation that it was necessary for interoperability with Microsoft documents, and it turns out it doesn't even do that. It also means no one can interoperate successfully with Microsoft Office 2007 except Microsoft. Neato. Back to Go. Do not collect $200. Isn't the Fast Track supposed to be for already *implemented* standards?

I know. After ISO was captured by Microsoft, nobody cares about rules any more. Brown hopes Microsoft will be a good doo-bee and fix this.

Full post as published by Groklaw on April 21, 2008 (boomark / email).