OXML Passes ISO Test, Word 2007 Fails

By Greg McNevin

April 24, 2008: Despite its triumph getting Open XML through as an ISO standard recently, Microsoft has ran into some strife as its own Word 2007 documents do not comply with the new OXML standard that was approved.

Last week Alex Brown, a consultant from Griffin Brown (the agency charged with ISO conformance testing) announced on the firm’s official blog that Word 2007 does not adhere to the latest ISO/IEC 29500 draft specifications.

Brown ran what he describes as a ‘smoke test’ on Word 2007, and found that changes made during the ISO ballot resolution meeting (BRM) in February seem to be causing headaches.

“[J]ing emitted 17MB (around 122,000) of invalidity messages when validating in this scenario,” writes Brown. “Most of them seem to involve unrecognised attributes or attribute values: I would expect a document which exercised a wider range of features to generate a more diverse set of error message.”

Despite its current shortcomings, Brown thinks that Microsoft should be able to remedy the current problems relatively easily.

“Given Microsoft's proven ability to tinker with the Office XML file format between service packs, I am hoping that MS Office will shortly be brought into line with the 29500 specification, and will stay that way,” adds Brown.

“Indeed, a strong motivation for approving 29500 as an ISO/IEC standard was to discourage Microsoft from this kind of file format rug-pulling stunt in future.”

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