Dublin Core is a standard for cross-domain information resource description and is defined in ISO 15836:2003.

[4] In a test with applications current in April 2007, XML-based office documents were slower to load than binary formats.

Rob Weir (an IBM employee and co-chair of the OASIS OpenDocument Format TC) asks "What is the engineering justification for this horror?".

In August 2007, the Linux Foundation published a blog post calling upon ISO National Bodies to vote "No, with comments" during the International Standardization of OOXML.

It avoids the re-use of relevant existing international standards (e.g. several cryptographic algorithms, VML, etc.).

There are literally hundreds of technical flaws that should be addressed before standardizing OOXML including continued use of binary code tied to platform specific features, propagating bugs in MS-Office into the standard, proprietary units, references to proprietary/confidential tags, unclear IP and patent rights, and much more".

[11] Spreadsheet documents use the XML vocabulary known as SpreadsheetML normatively defined by the schema sml.xsd which accompanies the standard.

It requires that implementations replicate a Lotus 1-2-3[12] bug that erroneously treats 1900 as a leap year.

[17] The OMML format is different from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) MathML recommendation that does not support those office features, but is partially compatible[18] through XSL Transformations; tools are provided with office suite and are automatically used via clipboard transformations.

[20] Murray Sargent has answered some of these issues in a blog post, which details some of the philosophical differences between the two formats.

In DrawingML you can also create 3d effects, for instance to show the different graphical elements through a flexible camera viewpoint.

It is possible to create separate DrawingML theme parts in an Office Open XML package.

This is a different approach to that of the OpenDocument format, which uses a subset of SVG, and includes vector graphics as separate files.

[25] OOXML documents are typically composed of other resources in addition to XML content (graphics, video, etc.).

[13] The Standard provides three mechanisms to allow foreign markup to be embedded within content for editing purposes: These are defined in clause 17.5 of Part 1.

These settings (including element with names such as autoSpaceLikeWord95, footnoteLayoutLikeWW8, lineWrapLikeWord6, mwSmallCaps, shapeLayoutLikeWW8, suppressTopSpacingWP, truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6, uiCompat97To2003, useWord2002TableStyleRules, useWord97LineBreakRules, wpJustification and wpSpaceWidth) were the focus of some controversy during the standardisation of DIS 29500.

Office Open XML uses distinctly named elements for each compatibility setting, each of which is declared in the schema.