by jlundstocholm
21. October 2009 14:18
It seems about time somebody wrote a bit about how Microsoft has chosen to implement ISO/IEC 29500:2008, aka OOXML. As you might know, Microsoft claims that Microsoft Office 2010 will implement “29500” in Transitional (T) sense. As far as my tests have shown (and they are in no way a complete and thorough application test) there no signs that this is not in fact true. So by launch day of Microsoft Office 2010 we (as in “the world”) will have at least one big implementation of 29500.
However – the devil, as always, lies in the details. So the question is not if they have implemented 29500 – the question is how.
This will be the first post in a series looking at the details (from a format perspective) of how Microsoft has chosen to implement 29500.
[Note: Documents markup for documents conforming to Transitional conformance clause (T) and for those that conform to Strict conformance clause (S) are virtually identical – for simple documents.]
I will maintain a list of items for Microsoft to consider as I go along. It is available at this permanent location.
Excel 2010
I will start by looking at Excel. Some of the most controversial parts of 29500 were focused on how Excel handles e.g. dates, VML, document protection etc., so this seems like a reasonable place to start. Also, the markup of SpreadsheetML is much easier to read than the markup of WordpressingML or PresentationML (methinks), so it should be the right place to kick this off.
Stay tuned for the first article looking at how the Excel team of Microsoft Office 2010 has dealt with ISO/IEC 29500.
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