It is incorrect for Andy to claim that Transitional was not part of ISO/IEC 29500 for OOXML. It was there initially and still remains part of the specification. There has been some tidying up of the boundaries between strict and transitional, but they have always been provided for in the 4-part IS 29500 specification.
Jim Thatcher's post from yesterday can be found at <http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/08/13/the-new-office-expands-file-format-options.aspx> The approach to migration and expansion of format support starting with Office 2003 is nicely-illustrated by the diagram in that blog post. The support in Office 2003 was by a "Compatibility Pack" upgrade and that worked at the transitional level, the only one that made sense that far back. The arrangement to consume Strict OOXML before providing producers of it is also sensible. The most interesting part for me is the greater parity in terms of ODF support, especially ODF 1.2 and OpenFormula. The other facet, not mentioned in Thatcher's piece, is that the Office Web Apps and Skydrive now support the "New Office" formats although not all features are exercisable in a browser. But this makes cross-platform interchange possible wherever Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome run. I think this expansion of the interoperable support of ODF will benefit the OpenOffice-lineage community as well as provide more diversity of supporting applications. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Lawrence Rosen [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 15:05 To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: FW: Office to Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at last) FYI. /Larry Lawrence Rosen Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm ( <http://www.rosenlaw.com> www.rosenlaw.com) 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482 Office: 707-485-1242 From: Andy Updegrove [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 8:53 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Office to Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at last) [ ... ] But after the dust settled, Microsoft did not fully implement the standard that it had fought so vigorously to have become a global standard. Instead, it implemented what it called "Transitional Open XML," which was better adapted for use in connection with documents created using older versions of Office. According to a blog posted yesterday by Jim Thatcher at the Office Next Web site, Office 13 will - finally - permit users to open, edit and save documents in the format that ISO/IEC approved. Thatcher says that Office 13 will also provide similar capabilities for the latest version of ODF, approved by OASIS in January of this year (ODF 1.2), as well as for PDF. [ ... ]
