Is there something in this document that prevents you from reading it in your preferred viewer? The extension suggests it's just an Office Open XML doc. I can read it in QuickOffice on my Android phone.

Given that my preferred viewer for this kind of thing is Okular, with a fallback to Firefox+pdf.js if necessary, it's already struck out twice.

My Android doesn't have Quick Office, it does have ThinkOffice but I can think of no reason I would a) read a computer language spec on my cell phone, or b) ever use ThinkOffice on purpose.

I think you've missed my point there. I wasn't suggesting you read it on your phone, I was demonstrating that you don't need Word using what was handy to me at the time (QuickOffice is owned by Google and was preinstalled). It's not a Word document. It's an office open XML document which dozens of free and commercial word processors and web apps can read and write. Not using your choice of previously-proprietary document formats doesn't make this an "oh, Redmond" moment.

Office "Open" XML is a proprietary format that got rubber-stamped as a standard to convey a sense of legitimacy. Significant parts of that standard say "do it like Word does" with varying degrees of indirection. Other office suites and viewers support it because they have to, not because the "standard" makes it any easier to do so.

Comments like this one suggest that the rubber stamp does indeed convey some legitimacy, which I'd consider unwarranted.

As a specification for a language coming out of Microsoft, it isn't unexpected to see it in Word format, and it's certainly possible to cope with it using any number of other tools without resorting to Word, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Use PDFs.

> Significant parts of that standard say "do it like Word does" with varying degrees of indirection

That's not correct. What it actually does is reserve some markup for use by third parties that have reverse engineered various old programs (including programs that competed with Microsoft programs), so that if those people have workflows that depend on features of those old programs that cannot be represented in OOXML, they can still use OOXML as a storage format but add in the extra information they need.

Here's the use case this is aimed at. Suppose I run, say, a law office, and we've got an internal document management system that does things like index and cross reference documents, manage citation lists, and stuff like that. The workflow is based on WordPerfect format (WordPerfect was for a long time the de facto standard for lawyers).

Now suppose I want to start moving to a newer format for storage. Say I pick ODF, and start using that for new documents, and make my tools understand it. I'd like to convert my existing WordPerfect documents to ODF. However, there are things in WordPerfect that cannot be reproduced exactly in ODF, and this is a problem. If my tools need to figure out what page something is on, in order to generate a proper citation to that thing, and I've lost some formatting information converting to ODF, I may not get the right cite.

So what am I going to do? I'm going to add some extra, proprietary markup of my own to ODF that lets me include my reverse engineered WordPerfect knowledge when I convert my old documents to ODF, and my new tools will be modified to understand this. Now my ODF workflow can generate correct cites for old documents. Note that LibreOffice won't understand my additional markup, and will presumably lose it if I edit a document, but that's OK. The old documents I converted should be read-only.

Of course, I'm not the only person doing this. Suppose you also run a law office, with a WordPerfect work flow, and are converting to an ODF work flow. You are likely going to add some proprietary markup, just like I did. We'll both end up embedding the same WordPerfect information in our converted legacy documents, but we'll probably pick different markup for it. It would be nice if we could get together, make a list of things we've reverse engineered, and agree to use the same markup when embedding that stuff in ODF.

And that's essentially what they did in OOXML. They realized there would be people like us with our law offices, who have reverse engineered legacy data, that will be extending the markup. So they made a list of a bunch of things from assorted past proprietary programs that were likely to have been reverse engineered by various third parties, and reserved some markup for each.

Be happy it's not XPS.

I recall years ago reading that the reason Microsoft releases their documentation in Office format (other than the whole eat-your-own-dog-food thing) is so that they have the ability to cryptographically sign the documents.

Fair enough, but PDF can do that as well.

But don't you need Adobe Acrobat to sign it? I won't fault them for using their own tool.

If we were talking about almost anything else from MS I'd probably agree with you. But this is the specification to a computer programming language, a language that MS has tried over and over to assuage the fears of open-source developers about. "Oh, it's standardized by ISO and ECMA!". "Look, Mono is proof it can be implemented cross-platform!", etc. And then they do stuff like this.

On the other hand look at the excellent work done by Microsoft Research (and then look at what format that final work is usually published in).

As a regular reader of Microsoft Research papers, I can assure there are quite a few of them published in Word and PowerPoint formats.

Quite a few of them are also LaTeX. Generally it's probably the same distribution of formats you see in academia as well. And often the publishing journal dictates what to use.

what on earth would you expect?

PDF or Postscript. Word is not a format that you should share finalized document. Why does anyone need to edit a spec?

If there is a good reason to edit, perhaps they should have made it an HTML document. Use LaTeX. Are they afraid the Office division will get them fired if they use anything other than Microsoft products?

> PDF or Postscript. Word is not a format that you should share finalized document. Why does anyone need to edit a spec?

PDF, sure. Postscript, uh, maybe missing the target audience a bit there.

> If there is a good reason to edit, perhaps they should have made it an HTML document. Use LaTeX. Are they afraid the Office division will get them fired if they use anything other than Microsoft products?

hahahahaha. Perhaps they think it's a good wordprocessing product which can be used by many different roles in the business?

And yes, there's a lot to be said for a company using its own products where they fit.

Maybe use epub then if you don't need the vector processing facilities of pdf. I find a mostly-text book will be 20% the size as an epub.

Wouldn't XPS be the best equivalent to PDF ?

I think that's the near-equivalent but I don't think that even Microsoft is trying to dogfood that anymore.