The Case against OOXML

This Blog post is written in Microsoft Word 2003 and then converted to XHTML with my Word Add-In, “CleanXHTML 1.2 for Microsoft Office Word 2003 (.NET 2.0).” This custom writing tool works because XSLT can transform the 2003 version of Microsoft’s WordProcessingML. My assumption is that a similar XSL transformation can be done to the newer, OOXML formats of the 2007 timeframe. According to David Scholl of Ford Motor Company on AG Speaks Episode 13 the power of free and open XSLT over OOXML is diminished by design.

The technical details of this design are described in “The Case Against OOXML” by Rob Weir:

OOXML makes use of “bitmasks” to encode multiple boolean (true/false) values into a single integer. Although this was once common 20 years ago when programming in C in constrained memory environments, it is considered very bad style in XML. It makes processing by standard XML tools like XSLT extremely difficult, since these tools lack bit-level operations needed to effectively process data at the bit level.

This makes me take a second look at the OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-in for Office and reminds me that my days of getting “Clean XHTML” from Word documents are numbered.

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