If I understood Joel's post correctly, he was describing "standards" (specifically web standards) that has to shift and change because it reflects changes / innovation (i.e. hacks) in the implementation (in other words, there's no strict reference implementation of the standard!). I guess if Microsoft works that way (as a software development paradigm) then I can imagine that the OOXML specs must be so convoluted that its just impossible to implement (even MS didn't pass its own standard, but at least there was a way to test against an ISO standard unlike web standards).

Kumusta na? :) Pasencia na, I take forever checking out comments captured as spam by Akismet, and take forever replying to posts!