There are approximately 2300 examples in the WordProcessingML section of the specification. These examples were tested for well-formedness and validity against the schema, using custom software. Approximately 300 of the examples are in error - more than 10. The list is available at http://surguy.net/articles/ooxml-validation-and-technical-review.xml The examples in error haven’t all been checked manually - but a random selection has been checked, and all of those have proved to be correctly identified as errors, which gives a high confidence that the majority of the remainder are also genuine errors.
(Opinion: While a certain number of errors is understandable in any large specification, the sheer volume of errors indicates that the specification has not been through a rigorous technical.)
The use of xml:space=’preserve’ is inconsistent in examples, which is confusing because it is not clear when and how they should be used. For example on page 989 one of the w:t elements has this attribute, the others do not. This should be corrected here and in all other examples.

Revise the text to address this comment. Provide a guarantee all examples are tested and syntactically meaningful.

General

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Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment GB-0135 (Modified: 2008-01-13) Agreed; the examples in the document will be modified so that they are all well-formed XML trees. A thorough pass will be made to identify all areas where this is not the case. It should be noted though that they will not be validated to the schema files because they are just fragments of a document and not an entire document. As such, they often do not start with the root element, but instead are often just a branch of the tree. In addition, there will often be ellipsis “…” within the example to show where other XML markup would normally appear. This missing markup is not relevant to the example, but it may be necessary in order for the file to be valid. This approach was used in order to get across efficiently the usage of the element to which the example pertains. For an example of the use of ellipsis, see the following, which appears in Part 4 clause 2.16.6: <w:bookmarkStart w:name="Text1" … /> <w:fldSimple w:instr="FORMFIELDTEXT"> <w:ffData> <w:calcOnExit/> … </w:ffData> <w:r> <w:t>1</w:t> </w:r> </w:fldSimple> <w:bookmarkEnd w:name="Text1" … /> <w:fldSimple w:instr="=Text1+10"> <w:r> <w:t>11</w:t> </w:r> </w:fldSimple> Regarding the use of xml:space="preserve", the use of this attribute is determined by the presence of significant leading and/or trailing whitespace within the t element, which is why it is not present in all instances. Similar Comments: CH-0015 , CL-0217 , DE-0147 , DK-0074 , IE-0011 , NO-0005 , PE-0007 , PL-0003 , US-0267