Microsoft Fails the Standards Test
In its pre-release form Office™ 2010 supports not the approved Strict variant of OOXML, but the very format the global community rejected in September 2007, and subsequently marked as not for use in new documents – the Transitional variant.
[Their] representatives will argue (with some justification) that terms like “legacy”, “deprecated”, and “new document” are tricky to define, but then this argument extends to the bizarre assertion that the Strict variant need never be supported. I believe, however, countries expect a more reasonable, plain-dealing approach to their clearly expressed intent – not this kind of wheedling sophistry. Mr Capossela writes that Microsoft has “learned a lot”; but on the evidence before us now, this was wishful thinking.