Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

blog.documentfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 131 posts

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#111

Post by Arainach »

piker wrote: post #110
Arainach wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is getting downvoted because it's ludicrous. Users want WYSIWIG - documents that are what appears on the printer page or when people they share the document to open it. "Interoperability" is something technical enthusiasts talk about and not something that users creating documents care about outside of the people they share with seeing exactly what was created.

I think you're missing the point that the "G" in WYSIWIG is "when printed". Everybody wants uniform rendering across applications in the way that, say, websites render uniformly across browsers. But fewer people care today what it looks like when printed--they're never going to print it anyway. They're just going to docusign it and call it a day. In other words, fidelity to the printed page isn't really as important…

No, the G is "get". Users want to create documents in their presentation format. When they create a table they want to see a table, not a bunch of pipes and plus signs. When they create a hyperlink they want to see the link text, not the URL and a bunch of brackets.

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#112

Post by techjamie »

Ekaros wrote: post #45
jpalomaki wrote: post #24

What we should really do is abandon the WYSIWYG approach to document editing. This inevitably leads into vendor lock in. Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content. Formats like markdown are nice, because they force you to do this. The old way made sense 30 yers ago when information was consumed on paper.

Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience... Ofc, if we stop really caring what things look like we could save lot of energy and time. Just go back to pure HTML without any JavaScript or CSS...

I've been quite happy with using Typst to write things at home. It's less arcane than LaTeX and easier to reason about.

At work I use our ChatGPT page to generate an HTML+CSS skeleton of what I want and tweak that. It's quicker for me than doing the equivalent in word, and easier to manipulate later. Most of the time I don't need anyone else editing my docs, so it works out.

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#113

Post by piker »

Arainach wrote: post #111
piker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point that the "G" in WYSIWIG is "when printed". Everybody wants uniform rendering across applications in the way that, say, websites render uniformly across browsers. But fewer people care today what it looks like when printed--they're never going to print it anyway. They're just going to docusign it and call it a day. In other words, fidelity to the printed page isn't really as important…

No, the G is "get". Users want to create documents in their presentation format. When they create a table they want to see a table , not a bunch of pipes and plus signs. When they create a hyperlink they want to see the link text, not the URL and a bunch of brackets.

Yes, the markup is hidden and the document is rendered in all cases. The point I was making, and I believe the parent was making, is that it doesn't have to be wed to the physical medium. Perhaps we're talking past each other here.

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#114

Post by mcswell »

I guess this is not directly related, but I worked on a modified DocBook XML schema for some years. We were writing grammars of natural languages, so we had no use for some of the DocBook constructs, and needed to add others. That wasn't hard. And there are WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editors, like XMLmind, which read the schema and helped you create conforming documents.

There are at least two ways to get from such an XML document to a PDF; we used pdfLaTeX, modified to handle our extra constructs, and then XeLaTeX.

I won't say it was a simple toolpath, but it allowed us to do at least two things that would have been difficult with Word or OpenOffice:

(1) It gave us an archival XML format, which will probably be readable and understandable for centuries. For grammars of endangered languages, that's important, because the languages won't be around more than a couple decades.

(2) It gave us the ability to cleanly typeset documents that had multiple scripts (including both Roman and various right-to-left scripts, like Arabic and Thaana).

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#115

Post by ninkendo »

Someone wrote: post #86
_the_inflator wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By accident, I saw firsthand how a simple layout, such as a page and a few paragraphs, can make you question why formats like Markdown are even possible, because the number one text processing tool would throw such a gigantuan load of crude syntax at you for a few paragraphs. Respect to MS for keeping the lights on. People need to understand that there is no MS format per se, but different standards from which you ca…

> And I bet that MS intended such a complicated format to prevent Open Source Projects from developing parsers and MS from losing market share this way. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it simply was “the XML schema mostly follows how our implementation represents this kind of stuff”. The source code of MS Word almost certainly has lots of now weird-looking design choices based on having to run in constrained memory…

> It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it simply was “the XML schema mostly follows how our implementation represents this kind of stuff”

That’s exactly what it was. They originally had a binary representation (.doc) which was pretty much just a straight-up dump of their internal data structures to disk. When they felt forced to make an “open” “xml-based” format, they basically converted their binary serialization to XML without changing what it represented at all. It was basically malicious compliance.

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#116

Post by wvenable »

nullbyte808 wrote: post #16
wvenable wrote: post #5

> Unfortunately, while an XML schema can be simple, it can also be unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features. One could now use that exact sentence to describe the most popular open document format of all: HTML and CSS.

Yeah but those are open standards, where as Microsoft is the only one with true knowledge of its XML.

You know you're referring to ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500?

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#117

Post by redeeman »

znpy wrote: post #69
jpalomaki wrote: post #24

What we should really do is abandon the WYSIWYG approach to document editing. This inevitably leads into vendor lock in. Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content. Formats like markdown are nice, because they force you to do this. The old way made sense 30 yers ago when information was consumed on paper.

This could only work if all people using computers are tech people, and willing to spend a couple of months learning latex or whatever. None of the two conditions are reality, of course. So yeah, that’s not happening.

no, instead they spend all their professional life not knowing what they work with, and waste much more time accumulated.

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#118

Post by Arainach »

piker wrote: post #113
Arainach wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the G is "get". Users want to create documents in their presentation format. When they create a table they want to see a table , not a bunch of pipes and plus signs. When they create a hyperlink they want to see the link text, not the URL and a bunch of brackets.

Yes, the markup is hidden and the document is rendered in all cases. The point I was making, and I believe the parent was making, is that it doesn't have to be wed to the physical medium. Perhaps we're talking past each other here.

Writing markdown is decidedly not WYSIWIG. Storing documents with a WYSIWIG editor in a markdown-like format isn't viable either - look how frustrated word processor users get if changing one element repositions another ("all my pictures move"). Users want things in a precise format.

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#119

Post by redeeman »

dathinab wrote: post #103
folbec wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, there is no need for nefarious intentions, when time constraint et mild incompetence suffice. The OOXML format is likely a not very deeply thought out XML serialization of the in memory structure or of the old binary format, done under time pressure (there was legal pressure on Microsoft at the time).

> The OOXML format is likely a not very deeply thought out XML serialization of the in memory structure or of the old binary format it somewhat looks like that, but that old binary format changed with every nth yearly major new version and IMHO it looks like not being far away from a slightly serialized dump of their internal app data structures ;) but putting aside that they initially managed to incorrectly implemen…

and they should have gotten the corporate death penalty for it. I think it should still be done. the sheer amount of crap microsoft has purposely bestowed upon the world should lead to life in prison for many of its decision makers

Re: Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

#120

Post by xcrunner529 »

constantcrying wrote: post #33
jpalomaki wrote: post #24

What we should really do is abandon the WYSIWYG approach to document editing. This inevitably leads into vendor lock in. Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content. Formats like markdown are nice, because they force you to do this. The old way made sense 30 yers ago when information was consumed on paper.

I don't think WYSIWYG is the issue here, WYSIWYG editors for markdown exist. It is the premise that document creation is about representing a piece of paper digitally. For most documents nowadays it makes no sense to see them as a representation of physical paper. And the word paradigm of representing a document as a if it were a piece of paper is obsolete in many areas where it is still being used. Ironically Atlass…

People inevitably want to print the contents, never mind the implications of column size for ease of reading.
Post reply on HN