It is stated that the standard was designed "from the start to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corporation". Creating a new international standard for ‘faithfully’ representing legacy documents is neither necessary nor desirable. The South African ‘corpus’ consists also of a significant number of documents in formats such as WordPerfect and Ghostwriter (for legal texts). It is not suggested that we promote new ISO standards for each of these.

This and all other references to particular vendor legacy implementations be removed from the document..

Overview, p1, Purpose of the Standard

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Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment ZA-0004 (Modified: 2008-01-08) As noted in the Ecma whitepaper “Office Open XML Overview” at http://www.ecma- international.org/news/TC45_current_work/OpenXML%20White%20Paper.pdf ), under “Purposes for the Standard”: OpenXML was designed from the start to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corporation. The standardization process consisted of mirroring in XML the capabilities required to represent the existing corpus, extending them, providing detailed documentation, and enabling interoperability. At the time of writing, more than 400 million users generate documents in the binary formats, with estimates exceeding 40 billion documents and billions more being created each year. The original binary formats for these files were created in an era when space was precious and parsing time severely impacted user experience. They were based on direct serialization of in-memory data structures used by Microsoft® Office® applications. Modern hardware, network, and standards infrastructure (especially XML) permit a new design that favors implementation by multiple vendors on multiple platforms and allows for evolution. The scope of DIS 29500 is consistent with these goals. We also note that many organizations have requested that such a standard be created. For example, at its meeting of 25 May 2004, the European Union specifically recommended that “Microsoft should consider the merits of submitting XML formats to an international standards body of their choice.” ( http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/2592/5588 )