Use of MCE in OOXML

[Shawn Villaron]

I'm not convinced that we'll see significant interoperability problems.

Here's where we are with Microsoft Office ( by MCE I mean extension lists and alternative content blocks, as well as the MCE attributes like 'ignorable'):

Office 2007	- No MCE included in "native" files; MCE present in existing files may or may not round-trip on resave ( varies app-to-app, feature-to-feature )
Office 2010	- MCE included in "native" files to represent features introduced in the 2010 release; same rules about pre-existing MCE in files
Office "15"	- Same Office 2010 MCE included in "native" files as well as new MCE to represent features introduced in the "15" release; same rules about pre-existing MCE in files

Regarding conformance classes, Office "15" will introduce the ability to save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files using the "Strict" conformance class; the applications will continue to support saving to the "Transitional" conformance class.

So far we've had considerable success with our MCE implementations.  We have multiple versions working across multiple platforms and it works as-expected.  We've run into a few bugs, but they were defects in our implementation and not in MCE.  Again, we've been pretty happy so far.

One thing we did when we built 2007 was that we encoded sample "future" features to make sure the 2007 product worked as expected.  An example of this was the PowerPoint 2010 sections feature.  We wrote it up way back in the 2007 release to ensure our file I/O pipeline worked.  

Naturally I'd be very interested in specifics that may cause interop problems with existing implementations.  That notwithstanding, the text could certainly be improved.  In the meantime, the vendors need to continue talking to one-another ...

Hope this helps.  Let me know if you need additional information.

shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: eb2mmrt at gmail.com [mailto:eb2mmrt at gmail.com] On Behalf Of MURATA Makoto
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 2:42 PM
To: SC34
Subject: Use of MCE in OOXML

Dear colleagues,

In my understanding, MCE was not used by Office 2007 and was used to a certain extend by Office 2010, thanks to MS proprietary extensions.  The next version of MS Office is expected to migrate to the strict conformance class and heavily use MCE to record transitional features.  I thus feel that poorly specified MCE will cause very significant interoperability problems.  Jim and John, please let me know if my understanding of MS Office is right.

Regards,

Makoto