Re:Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?...
by davidgerard on Sunday September 11, 2016 @05:26AM
(#12472618)
ECMA 376 is explicitly intended as documentation of what Office 2007 does. Michael Meeks of LO (then at Novell) worked on it and says it did this job: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-02-26-cabinet-of...
But in practice there's no such thing as "OOXML" - there's only what Office 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2016 happen to do. So if you want to work with the stuff, you verify everything. The standard is, like so much Microsoft documentation, best treated as based-on-a-true-story fiction with an unreliable narrator.
Is ECMA that "true", I don't know. At least they document a JavaScript without "JavaScript" in its name. MS Office (2010 at least) isn't compatible with the standard text. Is there even a MS Office nowadays that's better? Also Office 2010, dispite support, is hostile to OpenDocument format - opening a document gives you warnings about legacy format and what not.
The OOXML standatisation process was very controversial and left a bad taste around MS and ECMA Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...