Ever since the now infamous article by Alex Brown the blogsphere has been filled with interpretations of the, really not so surprising, results - that the OOXML document with the original ECMA-376 spec does not conform to IS 29500.
The, really not so surprising, conclusions have been "Office 2007 does not even produce valid OOXML" followed closely by statements like "This shows that Microsoft Office 2007 should not be allowed since it does not produce valid OOXML".
Hmmm ... ok.
As some of you might remember, I participated in some lab tests with OOXML/ODF interop in Fall 2007. Basically I sat in a small room with guys from IBM, Microsoft, Novell and some guys from the Danish National IT- and Telecom Agency sifting through documents, converting them and examining the resulting XML generated. The documents we worked on were supplied by different parts of the Danish public sector. They were basically told to use some of their existing documents as basis for the parts of the tests they participated in. So these documents were real-world-documents.
One of the things we tested was to see if the documents were in compliance with their respective specs. The original OOXML-documents we tested were all compliant to the ECMA-376 spec ... but it was a different case with the ODF-documents. So the other day I tried to validate all the sent-in original ODF-documents supplied to us.
The results are illustrated in the table below:
File name
|
Generator
|
Konklusion
|
DFFE_Afgået svar til Jane Doe.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.3
|
not valid
|
DFFE_SJ_(1) - 15-06-2007 Foreløbig Høring om
forslag.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.0
|
valid
|
GRIBSKOV_bek-281(BS).odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.0
|
valid
|
GRIBSKOV_Standardbrev ifm ITST
pilotprojekt.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.2
|
valid
|
GRIBSKOV_Udkast til Forslag til Lokalplan.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.1
|
not valid
|
ITST standardbrev ODT.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.0
|
valid
|
ITST Testdokument ODT.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.2
|
not valid
|
RM Kursusmateriale.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.0
|
not valid
|
RM Standardbrev 2s.odt
|
OpenOffice.org/2.3
|
not valid
|
The table contains information about the file name of the original document, the application that generated it (from the META-file in the ODF-package) and if the document passed the test.
Overall conclusion of this was:
Application
|
Creates consistantly valid ODF?
|
OpenOffice.org/2.0
|
|
OpenOffice.org/2.1
|
|
OpenOffice.org/2
|
|
OpenOffice.org/2.3
|
|
So should we demand that OOo not be used at all? Of course not, but we should keep the pressure on the OOo-team to fix their code ... just as we should with Microsoft and Microsoft Office.
4f45d3fe-cc34-4fc3-a137-8ae8ff4afbb6|0|.0|96d5b379-7e1d-4dac-a6ba-1e50db561b04