Cornelia's Weblog

I just read A Leap Back by Rob Weir and must say that this was a pretty enjoyable way to spend part of my Friday evening. In short, the post is about a mistake that Microsoft is making with respect to Office Open XML around the serialization of dates – seems Excel introduced a bug when it considered the year 1900 a leap year. Instead of Office Open XML serializing dates the right way they are now specifying this bug. Ugh. I keep thinking to myself “Really?”… “Really?”I’ve been working in standards for a little over a year now and have learned A LOT. One thing is that I had this naive notion that because the standards were generally crafted by a bunch of really smart and dedicated people that the right thing, by and large, gets done. Sure on some level I guess I realized that “bugs” could be introduced there just like anywhere else, but I thought the obvious stuff would get caught. Well, okay, sometimes I am naive. Okay, so Office Open XML is not a standard but its relevance can’t be easily dismissed so I sure hope this gets fixed.[Updated]Okay, so it is almost a standard, for what it’s worth. Report from the ECMA TC45 says in the 28 September, 2006 status report the committee members voted unanimously to accept the current draft as v1.0. Seems that this is now (as of 6 October) at the ECMA general assembly for final thumbs up – around December 2005.