AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine)

As I've detailed before, what you actually commit to with any of these "open" formats is
recreating the internals of the program that "set the standard", in this case OpenOffice.org.
If their borders get 4 pixels bigger when the font is over 20 points then it doesn't matter
that the "standard" is silent about border thickness, that's what you've got to implement to
load their documents.

In the event that you allow other people to come forward and add things to the "standard" as
well you end up with a standard that no-one implements. That worked out really well for HTML 4
and CSS right ? Just a decade later we've got three half-working implementations which overlap
on maybe 90% of features and it's finally starting to be usable... except the 800lb gorilla
doesn't implement them properly so you still can't use most of it. HTML 4 and CSS is a /walk
in the park/ compared to a usefully complete word processor or spreadsheet document format.

To be compelling, ODF needed to take large, real world documents, and create several programs
which, without code-sharing displayed those documents the same way, and got the same results
from arbitrary changes to those documents.  That was never even /attempted/ let alone
successfully tried.