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

["ken_north@compuserve.com" <ken_north@compuserve.com>]

Tim Bray wrote:
>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. 

Melvin Chin wrote:
>> I can understand that it's also difficult to document every single
>> interaction with every piece of module and feature (such as OLE

It appears that specifying conformance levels for both the OpenDocument and
OOXML specs will become necessary - with a basic level for documents that
are passive containers that exclude behavior. 

Both the ISO ODF and ECMA OOXML formats provide for inclusion of binary
objects (OLE). For interoperability, there will have to be runtimes and
type libraries for Linux, Solaris and other platforms to fully support OLE.
Microsoft made COM/OLE-related specs available to the OpenGroup, but it did
not provide documentation of higher-level OLE interfaces such as OLE
drag-and-drop, monikers, structured storage and data transfer. Software AG
licenses DCOM for Linux, but for a full OLE implementation for Linux or
Solaris you'd have to license Bristol's wind/u or Mainsoft for Unix/Linux.

ISO ODF also introduces a second dependency - needing a Java virtual
machine. Besides OLE, it also supports embedding Java applets.

Conformance levels would introduce a measure of security from knowing it's
possible to exchange documents that do not have embedded scripts or
executable objects.








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