Much has been made over the last 10 years of XML's ability to be easy to interoperate with. Not only is the data stored with natural language delimiters there exists XSLT which facilitates translating one document into the schema of another. It's with these motives that Microsoft switched Office file formats in the latest incarnation of their Office suite. The Office Open XML specification was billed as easy and standards based approach for creating word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents. It is intended to make it possible and easy for people to create documents without having to use the native Office binaries (i.e some 3rd party product). However, this isn't true if the XML structures are poorly laid out, convoluted and under documented. A new, long blog post on crtiquing the Office Open XML format does a pretty good job of showing where there problems are with this specification. What's especially interesting is that the examples are all relatively straightforward an easy to understand especially considering that file formats are usually a fairly arcane subject area for the lay person.
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