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Office Open XML final draft!!!

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As I already mentioned, in the last face to face meeting in Trondheim, Norway we unanimously voted to approve the final draft of the Office Open XML spec as ready to submit to the Ecma General Assembly. The GA will then review the draft and in December there will be a vote to approve it as an Ecma Standard!

This is a huge milestone, and the entire technical committee has worked extremely hard over the past year. We really had an amazing collection of contributors to this standard, and if you take a look, it will show: https://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC45-2006-50_final_draft.htm

For those of you interested, here is the list of all the organizations contributing to the standard:

  • Apple
  • Barclays Capital
  • BP
  • The British Library
  • Essilor
  • Intel
  • Microsoft
  • NextPage
  • Novell
  • Statoil
  • Toshiba
  • The United States Library of Congress

We posted the draft in three separate formats. There is a PDF version; a tagged PDF version (for accessibility); and a DOCX version.

The final draft is still broken out into 5 separate parts:

  1. Fundamentals – gives an overview of the structure of the formats, and describes all allowed parts; content types; and relationship types.
  2. Open Packaging Conventions – describes the basic conventions used for storing the parts of the file within a ZIP package. *
  3. Primer – gives a great description of all the markup languages and how they work. This serves as a great tutorial.
  4. Markup Language Reference – contains detailed descriptions of each and every element; attribute; and simple type. Serves as a great reference when you want to look up what an element means. **
  5. Markup Compatibility and Extensibility – describes how additional markup can be added to the format while still conforming to the spec

* Part 2 has a couple additional electronic resources. There are a few XSD files, as well as the equivalent RelaxNG files (we were lucky enough to have Rick Jelliffe help in the creation of these).

** Part 4 has a collection of XSD files and the equivalent informative RelaxNG files. There are also a collection of predefined cell and table style references for spreadsheetML, as well as a collection of predefined shape and text warp geometries for drawingML.

I've been giving pretty frequent updates on the progress of the spec, so most of the content at this point won't come as a surprise. We spent the last few weeks in the committee nailing down any potential interoperability issues, which included a new schema that allows applications to clearly define additional characteristics that may assist consumers in better handling their files. For example, it's possible to define what level of arithmetic precision was used for Spreadsheet formula calculations, so that a consuming application can accurately display the same results.

We're already seeing hundreds of developers working with the earlier versions of the draft, and this final version will really help everyone who's been waiting for it to solidify. If you go over to the openxmldeveloper.org site, you'll see there are almost 600 registered members and an extremely active discussion forum. There's also talk of starting up a blogging collection so that the members can actively blog about the solutions they are building. It's exciting seeing the diverse set of solutions; from document assembly on a linux box, to mind manager solutions that output wordprocessingML.

I'm already getting excited for what we do with version 2 of the spec (but I could use a little break between now and then). Here are a few fun facts about the work that's gone on over the past year:

  • 72 presentations were given to the technical committee explaining the existing behaviors of features so that discussion on how to best structure and document it could then take place.
  • 66 hours of live meeting discussions (starting at 6am every Thursday for those of us on the west coast of the US)
  • 88 schema files
  • 128 hours of face to face meetings held in Brussels (ECMA); Cupertino, CA (Apple); London (British Library); Sapporro, Japan (Toshiba); Redmond, WA (Microsoft); Trondheim, Norway (StatOil)
  • 6,000 pages of documentation between the 5 parts of the standard
  • 9,422 different items to document (3,114 attributes, 2,500 element, 3,243 enumeration, 567 simple types)

-Brian

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2006
    any cance that there will be non-european and more worldwide approval of the standard?

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2006
    Is there a particular standards body you are thinking of Wolfgang?

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2006
    Awesome!  It's great to see Microsoft working on and advocating open standards, congratulations on all the hard work!

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2006
    Hi Brian, can you tell me why the Word2007 uses two formats - VML and WordprocessingDrawingML- to represent Drawings? Do you have any advice on it for a docx reader's design, And where can i find the documents on it?

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 10, 2006
    Brian, despite all the criticism I made here on this blog, thumbs up and thank you. First time in history Microsoft really opens its Office formats. One can only hope that you will stay on this path and won't make anything in the future that could compromise the positive effects of this step. It is now up to another manufacturers to make use of your format and make true interoperability. Sincerely, John

  • Anonymous
    October 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 10, 2006
    "Word was only able to do the work to upgrade to the new DrawingML framework for Charts; Smart Art; and Pictures. All other drawings still use the legacy VML architecture. That's why we needed to include both VML and DrawingML in the standard; otherwise folks wouldn't have been able to fully interop. The hope of course is to move to use DrawingML for everything in future versions, as Excel and PowerPoint did." Excel 2007 uses VML to represent comments and the containment layer around OLE objects.

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2006
    Stephane you're right, I forgot about that. That's another example where we would want to move towards DrawingML eventually, but weren't able to for Office 2007. -Brian

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2006
    The past incarnations of DrawingML have been chaotic. It would be interesting, out of curiosity, to get an accurate history of what changed over time, perhaps to better understand what is supported in what. Here is my take, I am pretty sure I got at least 50% of it wrong :-)

  • pre-Windows 95 era, Word, Excel and Powerpoint use their own vector drawing layer used to draw shapes, pictures, diagrams, art and charts. Powerpoint, acquired by Microsoft in 1987, has by far the advanced drawing layer (bi-linear gradients, opacity, ...), codenamed Escher (in reference of the famous mathematician).
  • In Office 95, it is decided to reuse the Powerpoint vector graphics layer in Word and Excel. Migration begins.
  • Migration ends with Office 97 where both Word, Excel and Powerpoint use the same vector graphics layer, publicly known as MSO (mso97.dll)
  • In Office 2000, it's all craze about internet and Word tries to export WYSIWYG html. For that end, mark up extensions must be added to account for the MSO drawing layer. Hence the VML (Vector Markup language). Excel and Powerpoint don't support it. Internet Explorer natively supports VML (Internet Explorer's Direct animation vector drawing layer dismissed for performance reasons).
  • In Office XP, VML migration ends and both Word, Excel and Powerpoint support VML whenever a document is saved as a "Single web page archive" (.mhtml extension).
  • In Office 2003, nothing changes.
  • In Office 12, MSO gets rewritten with backwards compatibility in mind. The vector drawing layer uses more sophisticated drawing functionalities which makes it easier to draw themed, 3D realistic  objects. Technically, the differences are akin to the differences between GDI and GDI+. This new shared library is known as E2O and the corresponding mark up language is known as Drawing ML (Ecma TC45 specs).
  • In Office 14, ??? perhaps the drawing layer is rewritten, again, to 1) use WPF 2) to allow plugins, hence enabling much more sophisticated do-it-yourself scenarios. Use cases : custom charts ; BI analysis tools.

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2006
    Trondheim, Norway, 09/28/06. At the latest meeting of the Ecma TC45 technical committee, the final draft...

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2006
    I just saw this on Doug Mahugh's blog and it's really cool. Stephane Rodriguez has built a tool that

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2006
    Thanks Stephane's history story. There must be a big reason for using two formats. But it's really a big defect for a file format, and a nightmare for a document reader/writer.

  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2006
    Isn't the next step of the drawings format to move to XAML which will be the basis of the upcoming windows webdeveloper toolkit.

  • Anonymous
    October 13, 2006
    XAML? no more changes please, Is really the users want? no! they don't care about it.

  • Anonymous
    October 13, 2006
    No, we won't be moving from DrawingML to XAML. The use cases behind XAML are much different from those of DrawingML. You may see areas where we use VML eventually move to using DrawingML, but I don't see a move away from DrawingML for quite some time... -Brian

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2006
    Finally I have posted the updated (and final) mirror of the Office Open XML format specification to the

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2006
    Today we added Ecma Office Open XML final draft to the list of specifications covered by the OSP. Now

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2006
    Today we added Ecma Office Open XML final draft to the list of specifications covered by the OSP. Now users who implement solutions based on the Open XML format can choose to use either the language of the Covenant Not to Sue (CNS) or the language provided

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2006
    To quote Brian Jones : As I already mentioned, in the last face to face meeting in Trondheim, Norway

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2006
    One of the key benefits of the Open XML file formats is that they support all of the things you can do

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2006
    It's finally official. Today the Ecma General Assembly voted almost unanimously to approve the Office

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2007
    Enighed om Office Open XML format!