OOXML: Standards for accepting standards

The most serious allegations against OOXML are that it is incomplete in its detail, contains internal and historic contradictions, and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement on other platforms, which is the raison d’être for any standard. The design, implementation, limitations and further development of OOXML are exclusive to Microsoft. Evidence has also been shown that there are demonstrable interoperability failures between Microsoft Office 2007 outputs, which derives from the only existing implementation of the ECMA 376 specification of OOXML, and the specification itself, which is damning evidence against the acceptance of the standard in the first place. These include undocumented non-XML data and XML tags in the Office 2007 outputs that do not appear in the ECMA 376 specification.