Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

Contradictory Nature of OOXML

 http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070117145745854

An example of the mysterious ways things have evolved:

Starting with the somewhat silly, OOXML does not conform to ISO 8601:2004 “Representation of Dates and Times.”  Instead, OOXML section 3.17.4.1, “Date Representation,” on page 3305, requires that implementations replicate a Microsoft bug that dictates that 1900 is a leap year, which in fact it isn’t.  Similarly, in order to comply with OOXML, your product would be required to use the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function, and therefore assign incorrect dates to some days of the week, and also miscalculate the number of days between certain dates.