Re: [xml-dev] NY Times reference to 'secret coding'

[Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@Sun.COM>]

On Sep 5, 2007, at 7:01 AM, Jonathan Robie wrote:

> I'm not at all expert on these formats, but I think one of the  
> issues involves specifying some things in terms of the behavior of  
> Microsoft applications, instead of stating behavior in the spec.

*IF* I understand the ISO process correctly, this is why the just- 
completed vote was so important.  If OOXML had made it over the vote  
hurdles on this ballot, then all those objections and comments could  
have been dealt with using the "WS-Fed Technique", as described by  
Eve Maler in the April 5th update to http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/ 
archives/2007/04/04/ws-federation-tc-roundup-and-thoughts/

BTW, on all the weird callouts to product behavior in OOXML, I tend  
to suspect not malice, but the existence of blobs of little- 
understood code that eventually occur in any big code-base like  
Office.  Nobody wrote down what they do because nobody knows what  
they do.

  -T