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Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

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Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#101

Post by Yizahi »

monocasa wrote: post #56
s20n wrote: post #53

> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage I absolutely do not agree. Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts of unscrupulous activities to corrupt various National Standards Organisations to get it approved through the ISO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... >, which is clear evidence of malicious intent. This is a quote from Richard Stallman…

Specifically what I heard on the grapevine was that Microsoft sponsored a collection of small island nations into the ISO process, in exchange for their vote on OOXML.

That is not on MS though. That is a fault of those in change of ISO, that they assign same vote weight to the enormous empires and to the microstates. Votes should be proportional to the population, full stop. Then no one would be able to abuse the system by simply playing by the rules.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#102

Post by Freak_NL »

boricj wrote: post #100
Freak_NL wrote: post #99

If you ever write some HTTP endpoint where tabulated data is returned, you could quite reasonably return RFC 4180 style CSV. However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint, so why not code up a simple little reusable bit of code where you can write any simple tabular data (s…

> However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint Excel can directly ingest a CSV file served over an URL as data source, with the Accept header manually set to text/csv. I wrote a backend once that supported this feature so that management could pull whatever data they wante…

> Anybody who knows a bit of Excel can pull that data themselves by following a set of simple instructions.

That is very much possible. It is also completely impossible when you live in a country where Microsoft decreed that the C in CSV stands for semicolon; as far as Excel is concerned (no, seriously). Welcome in the Netherlands!

Now whether or not Excel can open a CSV file depends on the locale of the user, which will inevitably vary, and of course, whether they are using Excel at all.

So yes, you could offer just CSV, but not if your user is a spreadsheet jockey and you would like to stay on good terms with your support staff.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#103

Post by donatj »

You want to see something "fun" check out Apple's Numbers XML format from before they switched to protobuf. A simple 1,2,3 resulted in over 1 megabyte of XML.

At a previous job I'd been tasked with developing support for importing Numbers files along side our existing Excel and CSV support. After a couple days we rightly gave up as the tiny fraction of people who actually wanted to import Numbers files was outweighed by it's massive complexity.

We ended up just adding instructions for Numbers users to export to CSV

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#104

Post by jonathaneunice »

Yes, artificially complex.

No one genuinely interested in document openness—be it for document workflows, publishing automation, content archiving, or future-proofed documents—would have done it that way.

Maybe it was as simple as dumping a simplistic re-encoding of its legacy binary format into XML and ramming it through standards organizations. But yes, there was malice aforethought and a classic Microsoft playbook in motion: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#105

Post by rglullis »

pjmlp wrote: post #98
izacus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standards committees being completely divorced from reality of software engineering is why most of the standards are useless. So the question is whether it was actually a loss.

Like POSIX, OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, C, C++, JavaScript, TCP/IP,....

Is there any example on your list where the standard came before the implementation?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#106

Post by shaky-carrousel »

gregopet wrote: post #62
s20n wrote: post #53

> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage I absolutely do not agree. Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts of unscrupulous activities to corrupt various National Standards Organisations to get it approved through the ISO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... >, which is clear evidence of malicious intent. This is a quote from Richard Stallman…

My wife worked in one of the national standardization organizations. She was urgently called into her boss' office: "Please be on this meeting with me, I think they will try to bribe me if I'm alone". It only happened once while my wife worked there and it was right before the vote where Microsoft tried to fast track their office format.

It's what we the old farts have been saying during decades. Do not ever trust Microsoft, they are corrupt beyond hope, they're evil.

But people got blindsided by the new Microsoft propaganda.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#107

Post by devnonymous »

s20n wrote: post #53

> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage I absolutely do not agree. Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts of unscrupulous activities to corrupt various National Standards Organisations to get it approved through the ISO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... >, which is clear evidence of malicious intent. This is a quote from Richard Stallman…

From the same wikipedia article:

> An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."[55]

Sure, yeah, that's not deliberate Sabotage /s

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#108

Post by masfuerte »

flomo wrote: post #64
nneonneo wrote: post #57

Microsoft seems to have known that they could ram basically anything through a standards body, so they presumably didn't bother to actually try and simplify the standard. Instead, it's basically an XML serialization of their older binary formats, complete with all of the quirks and bugs that have to be emulated for 100% compatibility. To be fair, we're talking about a product line with over 35 years of history here.…

Officially now MS-CFB (i think). OLE2 generally refers to a predecessor to COM, and not just the file format. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...

Being pedantic, OLE1 was the predecessor. OLE2 used COM for its plumbing.

Wikipedia has an article on the file format [1]. It was quite nice. It works like an uncompressed zip file with transactional updates.

Earlier Word document formats were much worse. They were a dump of Word's memory contents. Saving and loading was very quick though!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_File_Binary_Format

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#109

Post by devnonymous »

devnonymous wrote: post #107
s20n wrote: post #53

> Why Microsoft’s Motive Wasn’t Deliberate Sabotage I absolutely do not agree. Not only is the standard overly complex, Microsoft also indulged in all sorts of unscrupulous activities to corrupt various National Standards Organisations to get it approved through the ISO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... >, which is clear evidence of malicious intent. This is a quote from Richard Stallman…

From the same wikipedia article: > An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."[55] Sure, yeah, that's not deliberate Sabotage /s

Also this:

> Google stated that "the ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages" and that

    If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison.

    Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising.[118]

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#110

Post by devnonymous »

clort wrote: post #74
quotemstr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some myths just won't die. OOXML is complex because it has to be. It has to losslessly round trip through an open format every single feature of Office. That's a lot of features. Yes, it's complex. Should Microsoft have cut features of Office just to make OOXML simpler? That's ridiculous. What about users who relied on those cut features? It was fair to ask Microsoft to open the file format. It wasn't fair to expect…

You are wrong. Microsoft was not asked to open the file format. There was an open file format already accepted as an ISO standard, so now they needed to make their product compliant with an ISO standard because companies around the world were going to prioritise that in their purchases. They did everything they could to ensure that their format was both an ISO standard, and impossible for somebody else to implement.

Small change to emphasize the intent:

> because companies and governments around the world were going to prioritise that in their purchases.

Governments are the largest revenue stream of pretty much every large software company starting from IBM/Xerox to OpenAI. MS is well known to indulge in all sort of legally grey practices to win such contracts.

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