atw: OpenDocument vs Microsoft's Office Open XML

For those of you interested in the office document format standards wars...
Background: the OASIS OpenDocument format became an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) on 8 May 2006.
Microsoft’s Office Open XML specification (OOXML) was approved by ECMA International on 7 December 2006. It is now being run through the ISO process in an attempt to become a competing standard for office documents. Numerous people (with a lot more technical knowledge than I) have been blogging about its problems for months.
Any doubts about the significant problems in the OOXML specification should be dispelled by the impressive list of objections in an article published on Tuesday on Groklaw: "Deadline Looms to Express Concerns about ECMA 376 Office Open XML", http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070123071154671 

One participant (Rob Weir) commented:
"What they found is amazing… I have been reading the OOXML specification, on and off, for a few months now, noting in this blog [http://www.robweir.com/blog] the problems I’ve seen. I thought I had a good grasp of the problems. But I was wrong. I was just scratching the surface. The Microsoft guys think I have been complaining too much. But it now looks like I wasn’t complaining enough." 

--Jean
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