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

[Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>]

Tim Bray wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.

Oh, I agree with you. I definitely think, from the discussions I've had 
with various Microsoft people over the years, that there is real intent 
to open up these data formats. It's just a lot of work to get this all 
documented.

Jonathan