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Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

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Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#111

Post by MereInterest »

Yizahi wrote: post #101
monocasa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, failure to stop a bad actor from taking a hostile action absolves the bad actor of all responsibility for that hostile action? Because that seems to be what you're saying.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#112

Post by me-vs-cat »

conartist6 wrote: post #96
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…

I seriously don't see the author's purpose in trying to establish a distinction. If I act like I hate you: say I come and light your house on fire and salt the earth where you raise your crops and poison the water from your family's drinking well, would it not be reasonable to say that I hate you? If you can then confirm that I have no intention to stop (even though I know I'm hurting you) and all I have to say in my…

In other words: "the purpose of a system is what it does". Duck-typed ethics?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#114

Post by jrochkind1 »

conartist6 wrote: post #96
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…

I seriously don't see the author's purpose in trying to establish a distinction. If I act like I hate you: say I come and light your house on fire and salt the earth where you raise your crops and poison the water from your family's drinking well, would it not be reasonable to say that I hate you? If you can then confirm that I have no intention to stop (even though I know I'm hurting you) and all I have to say in my…

One difference it might make is a warning for those who aren't deliberately trying to make something complex, and think they might thus be immune from the result. In fact, you can wind up with something terribly complex as a result of other pressures, incentives, history, and context, without it having been deliberate. It takes active investment and skill to avoid complexity, even if not intended.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#115

Post by simoncion »

unscaled wrote: post #47
piker wrote: post #3

Dead on. Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementati…

This may be nitpicking, but the complexity in OOXML is not "necessary", at least not in the sense of what Fred Brooks would call essential complexity. As OP clearly demonstrate, the complexity in OOXML is not artificial: there was never some grand conspiracy by Microsoft to create a format that competitors will find it hard to implement. But very little of this complexity is necessary for a standard interoperable doc…

> [T]here was never some grand conspiracy by Microsoft to create a format that competitors will find it hard to implement.

No, it's just an ordinary conspiracy. Everywhere in the spec you see shit that says "Do it like Word95 does" or "Do it like Word97 does" is an intentional aspect of the standard that makes it unreasonably difficult for anyone who wishes to faithfully read or write documents in this format to do so.

It is inappropriate for an open standard to define behavior in terms of an undocumented proprietary black box. The primary reason for an open standard to exist is to permit interoperability. Anyone who has read nontrivial portions the standard would argue that ISO shouldn't have standardized OOXML as it was. It's a damn shame that Microsoft acted in bad faith to exploit ISO's rules [0] in order to ram a very poorly-specified standard through. It's always sad when people and organizations that should be acting pro-socially choose to do the opposite.

[0] By paying money to stack the organization with a bunch of entities whose only interest was to vote "yes" for the ratification of this standard, natch. IIRC, ISO had to modify their rules again after the OOXML vote because they couldn't get quorum due to those one-issue voters refusing to show up for future business.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#116

Post by sevensor »

thomasfl wrote: post #84
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…

I worked for the Norwegian standard organization at the time. After seing with my own eyes how Microsoft was able to get OOXML approved, I quit doing standards. The OOXML standard is a joke. Three different ways to store basically the exact same thing. Like dates.

Indeed. “The bad standard is the result of negligence rather than malice” is a total nonsequitur. It in no way excuses pushing a bad standard on everybody to say, “they didn’t mean to make it bad.” It was still bad in obvious ways, and they still did power moves and underhanded things to get it signed off over legitimate technical objections. The reasons it was bad are irrelevant to the fact that it was bad and they promoted it.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#117

Post by noAnswer »

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…

For all my life, whenever I File > Opened a CSV file with Excel, all its content ended up in column A. I always have to work via Import Data and specify the file encoding and what the C in CSV stands for.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#118

Post by EdwardCoffin »

I remember reading an early criticism of the spreadsheet side of OOXML, where a simple spreadsheet with three cells was created: A1 containing '1', B1 containing '2', and C1 containing the formula A1+B1. That spreadsheet was saved, the file opened in an editor which showed the values of the cells, and A1 changed to something else, say 3. This broke the spreadsheet, as there were all sorts of knock-on effects contained in the virtually opaque mess that followed the cell contents.

I've probably got the details wrong, but that was the gist of it. I'd love to rediscover the analysis, but my searches have not yielded it.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#120

Post by itsthecourier »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #118

I remember reading an early criticism of the spreadsheet side of OOXML, where a simple spreadsheet with three cells was created: A1 containing '1', B1 containing '2', and C1 containing the formula A1+B1. That spreadsheet was saved, the file opened in an editor which showed the values of the cells, and A1 changed to something else, say 3. This broke the spreadsheet, as there were all sorts of knock-on effects containe…

exactly, the author ignored the specs and try to come with conclusions of a system, just by doing a Hello World
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