It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.
That's actually a load or horse shit (excuse my French). I've worked with both ODF and OOXML extensively as we write document templating software and I'll pick OOXML over ODF any say. It's less quirky, there are decent COTS tools to handle it and the output rendering is consistent regardless of which tool you pick to do the rendering. It's also better documented and way more intuitive.
I really don't know where you are getting these facts from other than the usual spiel that Microsoft does only evil.
The standards are open, published and free to implement (look for Microsoft open specifications). The documentation is way better than anything else out there.
So LibreOffice obviously reimplemented lotus 123, wordperfect and wordstar did they as well?
Note that post isn't written by some random GNU fanatic, but one of the key figures involved in the standardization.
"The simple validators developed by me (Office-o-tron) and by Jesper Lund Stocholm (ISO/IEC 29500 Validator) reveal, to Microsoft's dismay, that the output documents of the Office 2010 Beta are non-conformant, and that this is in large part due to glaring uncorrected problems in the text (e.g. contradictory provisions). It is also a worrying commentary on the standards-savvyness of the Office developers that the first amateur attempts of part-time outsiders find problems with documents which Redmond’s internal QA processes have missed. I confidently predict that fuller validation of Office document is likely to reveal many problems both with those documents, and with the Standard itself, over the coming years."
The whole point of the article is that "complying with transitional" is bullshit. It's just the second time that Microsoft got a standards org to rubber stamp whatever crap they were already outputting. And both times they failed to even document that properly.
ECMA does that for a living but they only got away with it at ISO because Microsoft promised it was only for legacy documents and they would fully comply with strict. It looks like they're at least claiming strict conformance for output in 2013 (as the blog notes basic tesing showed they couldn't even document their own output correctly in 2010).
And you're proudly claiming that they'll phase out the production of documents they described as only for "legacy" in 2008 a mere 12 years later.
They destroyed the credibility of the ISO to maintain their format monopoly.
Of course there are - Microsoft's ecosystem is huge. And tools can use Office as a library
> output rendering is consistent
That's not a format problem
> It's also better documented
Now that's just wrong. It's more extensively documented (the spec is an impressive stack when printed) but there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code. If you really want to know how to read an ODF document, you can always read LibreOffice's source code. And use it too.
there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code
That's even more horse shit and a poor excuse if there ever was one for not documenting something properly.
The source code by nature covers a subset of the standard as it can't cover every logical edge case and it isn't verified. At least the documentation is the verification source.
Not only that, I've delved into the LibreOffice source code and it's horrible, convoluted and a rats nest from hell.
I think you are not paying attention. In addition to the documentation you found confusing, ODF comes with a reference implementation. While sometimes the LibreOffice source code can be daunting, especially if you are not that a good coder, it's runnable and evidently usable. I'm not advocating not writing documentation (I take great pains not only to document my code but to also provide comprehensive tests for it).
I don't know what kind of code you do, but your lack of faith in the clarity of your code and your tests as a form of documentation is disturbing. I hope your clients can't identify you from your comments.
