Hear What Ecma Has to Say About Open XML

The following is a summary from "Office Open XML Overview," by Ecma International.
OpenXML_White_Paper.pdf

The Need for Open XML

The original binary formats of Microsoft Office files were created in an era when space was precious and parsing time severely impacted user experience. Modern hardware, network, and standards infrastructure (especially XML) permit a new design that favors implementation by multiple vendors on multiple platforms and allows for evolution. Concurrently with those technological advances, markets have diversified to include a new range of applications not originally contemplated in the simple world of document editing programs. These new applications include ones that:

• Generate documents automatically from business data.
• Extract business data from documents and feed those data into business applications.
• Perform restricted tasks that operate on a small subset of a document, yet preserve editability.
• Provide accessibility for user populations with specialized needs, such as the blind.
• Run on a variety of hardware, including mobile devices.

Perhaps the most profound issue is one of long-term preservation. Preserving the financial and intellectual investment in those documents (both existing and new) has become a pressing priority. The emergence of these four forces — extremely broad adoption of the binary formats, technological advances, market forces that demand diverse applications, and the increasing difficulty of long-term preservation — have created an imperative to define an open XML format and migrate the billions of documents to it with as little loss as possible. Further, standardizing that open XML format and maintaining it over time create an environment in which any organization can safely rely on the ongoing stability of the specification, confident that further evolution will enjoy the checks and balances afforded by a standards process. ⁽¹⁾

About Open XML

• Open XML was standardized by Ecma International, a Geneva-based standards organization, on December 7, 2006. ⁽²⁾
• The work to standardize Open XML has been carried out via Ecma's Technical Committee 45, which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the U.S. Library of Congress. ⁽¹⁾
• Open XML can be freely implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. ⁽¹⁾
• Open XML was designed from the start to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corporation. At the time of writing, more than 400 million users generate documents in the binary formats with estimates exceeding 40 billion documents and billions more being created each year. ⁽¹⁾
• Ecma Open XML has been submitted to the International Organization for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) for further ratification. The five month balloting period when ISO/IEC national body members may vote on ratification of Open XML has begun and will conclude on September 2. ⁽²⁾
• If approved by ISO, Ecma expects maintenance and evolution of the standard will be done jointly between ISO and Ecma. ⁽³⁾

Key Benefits of Open XML

• High fidelity migration to open formats: OpenXML has been designed to be capable of faithfully representing the majority of existing office documents in form and functionality. ⁽³⁾
• Enhanced interoperability: Open XML avoids dependence on the run-time environment of the application that produced a document. It is independent from any particular type of source content, and conforms to open W3C standards such as XML and XML Namespaces. ⁽¹⁾
• Compactness: The Open XML files are on average 25 percent smaller, and at times up to 75 percent smaller, than their binary counterparts. Compactness is achieved through compression, short namespace prefixes, and avoiding repetition throughout the file format ⁽¹⁾.
• Low barriers to developer adoption: An experienced developer can begin to write simple Open XML applications within a few hours of beginning to read the specification. Although the Specification describes a large feature set, an OpenXML-conformant application need not support all of features in the Specification. ⁽¹⁾
• Integration with business data: Open XML enables organizations to integrate productivity applications with information systems that manage business processes by enabling the use of custom schemas. An organization's goals in taking this approach would be to reuse and automate the processing of business information that is otherwise buried opaquely inside documents, where business applications cannot read or write it. ⁽¹⁾
• Internationalization: Open XML supports internationalization features required by such diverse languages as Arabic, Chinese (three variants), Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Turkish. Open XML inherently supports Unicode because it is XML. In addition, Open XML has a rich set of internationalization features that have been refined over the course of many years, such as text orientation, text flow, number representation, date representation, formulas, and language identifiers. ⁽¹⁾
• Room for innovation: Open XML is designed to encourage developers to create new applications that were not contemplated when the Office binary formats were defined, or even when Open XML was initially defined. Open XML includes extensibility mechanisms that work together to allow interoperability between applications with differing feature sets. Some of the most substantial opportunities for innovation do not involve rendering documents for direct user interaction. Instead, they involve machine-to-machine processing using XML message formats. ⁽¹⁾
• Accessibility: Open XML includes enough information for assistive technology products to properly process documents. ⁽¹⁾
• Long term document preservation: ⁽¹⁾