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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

"The specification is inadequate to imitate Office" is a different claim from "it only exists as a proprietary, closed format."

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From what I've heard, the MS Office applications do not even entirely comply with the published specification. So OOXML is still not a definition of the format with which PowerPoint stores its files.

The spec isn't actually self-consistent, so it's not clear that it can ever actually be implemented:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080328090328998

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?stor...

Your source claims the spec contradicts previous adapted ISO standards, not that it contradicts itself (which is what I assume you mean by it not being self-consistent). It does, however, raise the issue of bits like legacy compatibility for Word 97 behavior and scripts not being documented.

Well, no, it is self-inconsistent in places [0]. However, as you mention, those are probably minor points compared to how it contradicts existing standards, like the Gregorian calendar [1], date representation, and language codes.

0: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20070123071154...

1: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20070123071154...

Those are annoyances and give increased complexity. They are not, as you described earlier, inconsistencies that make the spec impossible to implement.

So they're just like every other standard on the Web, basically.

Other standards, and web standards in particular, tend to have several open source implementations to guarantee that it's possible to build tools that support it without being the reference implementation. OOXML has no such thing, and the reference implementation is closed source, so it's basically impossible to replicate in any practical sense.

There aren't several implementations of Office Open XML formats in open source projects? I don't think that's accurate.

Not fully compatible with PowerPoint, no. That's why I said the PowerPoint format is proprietary; it's impossible to build a working interoperable tool, because either parts of its format remain secret and do not follow the published standard, or the format itself makes references to hidden implementation details.

For most purposes I think that's basically academic.

Having an open source tool that can open files created on PowerPoint without them becoming horribly mangled, or vice versa, is a very realistic concern. Microsoft Office is well known for being extremely difficult to make its file formats portable beyond the very basic layout features.

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