Microsoft has screwed up yet another standards effort

Arst Design has a probing article on Microsoft's Open Office 2007 standard.' Yeesh. OOXML is even worse than I thought. And to think I wanted to give Microsoft the benefit of a doubt. Fool me once

Microsoft is trying to push new file formats that are using ZIP and XML. Are those new file formats any good for Office developers ? In other words, should anyone feel safe to make direct access to file parts, and start getting free of running instances of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 and its COM object model, usually through VBA?

They insist on the fact that, provided you make a valid use of the XML, pretty much changing the content of anything in an existing document can be achieved by sequentially 1) unzipping the content 2) making appropriate changes to one or more XML parts that are compatible with the provided XML schemas and open packaging relationships 3) zipping the content back.

Unfortunately, Microsoft doth insist too much, as the article points out. The OOXML spec churns out broken code. Try again, Redmond.