Microsoft Drops Old Software Support from OOXML to Satisfy Standards Groups

When Microsoft's new office document format, Office Open XML (OOXML), was sent up to the Ecma for standards approval, the board brought up of a number of outstanding issues and asked Microsoft to fix them. One of the highest priority problems cited by several of the members involved support for legacy Microsoft software in the format. The ISO standards board also raised similar concerns.

OOXML is currently in the comment review and revision stage, and it will undergo another round of review at the ISO in February, 2008. To appease its critics, Microsoft is deprecating several features in OOXML to remove reliance on older, proprietary Microsoft software. The changes are outlined on Ecma's website, and they involve things like the removal of VML graphics support, zero dependency on old installations of Word, and a fix for the "leap year bug" in office docs.

Microsoft is following standard Ecma procedure by implementing these fixes. But as Redmond's critics are quick to point out, moving such features to a "deprecated" status will not ease the adoption of OOXML as a standard – in order for software to be able to read a file with those deprecated features inside of it, that application will need to support the deprecated features.

As OpenDocument fellowship member Russell Ossendryver points out on his blog, Microsoft's current release of Office 2007 can read the Ecma standard version and the ISO draft standard version of OOXML, but it can't write them:

Launch Microsoft Office and try to save a file in the format specified by the draft standard at ISO. You can't. There is no compatibility mode in Microsoft Office that limits input to the feature set specified in the official Microsoft Office Open XML draft ISO standard. Any suggestions of interoperability for anyone wanting to support the Microsoft Office Open XML specification is ridiculous, especially since Microsoft itself won't allow its customers to write to that format.

Ossendryver goes on to call Microsoft's appeals to the standards groups a "smoke screen," and cites numerous instances of incompatibility between Office 2007's output and the current standards on file at Ecma and ISO.

In the past, Ossendryver has vocally criticized Microsoft and its allies for their efforts to compete with the OpenDocument Format, an ISO-recognized standard office doc format that's already widely implemented.

As of his readers named "tz" says in the comments to Russell's post, Microsoft's latest move is more about politics than true standards compliance:

(Office 2007) sort of does OOXML, and governments sort of require open standards to be used, so they can approve using MSOffice, can't they? Instead of an internal spreadsheet application server that works with any browser? Or any of the many ODF compliant programs? Politicians often can't understand the difference between "open and compliant" and slightly open with lots of proprietary, non-compliant stuff that will be almost unavoidable – it will be easier to save to ODF in Word or Excel than to fully standard OOXML.