What's wrong with MS formats ending at «x»?

[Hi-Angel]

Probably this question could sound like why is everyone telling a «docx/xlsx/pptx» formats is undocumented, but it is a bit vague.

I’m just wonder: today I am occasionally found an article at MSDN saying that the «docx/xlsx/pptx» are documented of 2010 year. I am not use Office documents very much, but often hear of others that e.g. «pptx» presentation often displayed wrong in either of MS Office or LO. The arguments I heard so far told that these formats isn’t documented, i.e. its support done with reverse-engineering. But today I found it is wrong, so I am curious:

what is the real problem with these formats?

[Lupp]

I didn’t. But you may study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML_file_formats. You may learn from it that the standards supplied cover about 8000 pages (as compared with about 1100 for OASIS OpenDocument). This is more than 5 times the size of my complete Bible. It may mean this or that. … Some texts I found interpreted this meaning that the OOXML isn’t an offer for openly exchanging documents but an invitation to surrender. You see, LibreOffice and other implementations of the odf standards are not treated by their developers as integrated clones of the different MS office applications. But trying to completely comply with OOXML would force them to change that. And that on a questionable basis as OOXML isn’t a standard defined in advance to set guide lines for different implementations. It will, at least in parts, just describe the actual behaviour of one specific existing implementation. And those who “destilled” that 8000 pages from a history of software development inside their company might not be interested to put things optimally clear because they themselves won’t have to implement them subsequently. To maintain the lead over possible competitors might also be a motive. Maybe I don’t judge MS as distinct as morally immaculate as they deserve.