The presence of non-XML characters, escaped, or not escaped in an OOXML document, is contrary to interoperability of XML and XML-based tools.

The W3C’s Internationalization states "Control codes should be replaced with appropriate markup.". The bstr type should be revised and the control codes that demands this data type should be properly converted to XML, based on the OPC-Open Package Convention specification.

Pg. 5122 Part 4 Section 7.4.2.4

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Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment BR-0059 (Modified: 2008-01-04) We agree that control codes should not be stored within the text of an element value. However, these characters do not represent control codes–this property is used solely to store user-defined data stored within the legacy document format; as such, we believe that it would be inappropriate to remove this datatype from the specification and lose this information. As suggested by the Canadian National Body, we believe some clarification would be useful; as a result, the following change will be made in Part 4, §7.4.2.4, page 5,122, lines 2­6: This element defines a binary basic string variant type , which can store any valid Unicode character . For all Unicode characters that cannot be directly represented in XML , as defined by the XML 1.0 specification, the characters are shall be escaped using the Unicode numerical character representation escape character format _xHHHH_, where H represents a hexadecimal character in the character’s value. [Example: The Unicode character 8 is not permitted in an XML 1.0 document, so it shall be escaped as _x0008_. end example] Similar Comments: CA-0064 , CO-0232 , FR-0378 , GB-0591 , GR-0010 , US-0161