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

blog.documentfoundation.org

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

#121

Post by piker »

Arainach wrote: post #118
piker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody is proposing that people will be writing markdown by hand in text editors. Just that a lot of the complexity of rendering stuff on the screen precisely as it would be printed on, say, A4 paper can perhaps soon be left behind. People print a lot less these days, and thus WYSIWYG (in the original 70s, 80s and early 90s sense of the term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG) may be less important.

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

#122

Post by mdaniel »

72deluxe wrote: post #83
masa331 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific here? HTML and CSS can't be described like that in my opinion. It is complex but not complicated. You can start with just a few small parts and get to a usable and clean document within hours from the first contact with the languages. The tags and rules are usually quite self-describing while consice and there are tons and tons of good docs and tools. The development of the standards is also…

Since HTML is valid XML, it really is perfectly acceptable to say it's the same!

  
I don't think that's true.

  Perhaps you're thinking of xhtml?
Observe the lack of a closing p tag, to say nothing of the multiple self-closing tags in html: hr, img, link, meta, ...

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

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

#123

Post by mdaniel »

wvenable wrote: post #116
nullbyte808 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In OP's defense, is there a freely available reference implementation of that standard? I know that LibreOffice certainly tries but I'd guess theirs is closer to a reverse engineered than reference impl

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

#124

Post by mjevans »

lozenge wrote: post #21
mjevans wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't those reasons effectively...? 'special case everything we ever used to do in office so everything renders exactly the same' Instead of offering some suitable placebo for properly rendering into a new format ONCE with those specific quirks fixed in place?

What would that look like? "You have opened your Word 97 document in Office 2003. The quirks have been removed, so it might look different now. Check every page before saving as docx." "You have pasted from a Word 97 document into an Office 2003 OOXML document. Some things will not work."

Office could freely continue to support their old proprietary formats if they wanted.

In an ideal world a converter would generate E.G. a 1200 PPI render of each page, then compare it to a similar render as provided in the nearest rendition in the allowed simple new format. Those could be diffed to produce a highlight of areas that changed.

The software could then ask if the transcription from one format to the other was close enough, or if there were some corner case that wasn't good enough.

Bonus points, collect feedback if the end user is willing to submit examples.

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

#125

Post by constantcrying »

xcrunner529 wrote: post #120
constantcrying wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>People inevitably want to print the contents

For most content this is not the case. It is also obviously easier to go from a page agnostic format to a format which relies intrinsically on page size.

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

#126

Post by djohnston »

I spent some time reverse engineering bits of WordML for presentation to LLMs. Not a fun time. Things like ordered list formatting ends up having a lot of unspecified behaviour and precedence, and the same doc in gdocs and word will end up rendering differently because they decided on their own precedences.

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

#128

Post by herbst »

piker wrote: post #28
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.

Not sure why you're getting so downvoted. It's a totally reasonable opinion in 2025 but it faces massive adoption headwind. People still cling to the idea of printing pages of documents even if it's increasingly rare (even, say in legal) for them to do so.

But then always when there are websites that DO NEED to get printed, you can be sure you are going to print at least the full footer, several ad banners and one or two pages with basically no content as well.

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

#129

Post by herbst »

fxtentacle wrote: post #53
bboygravity wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and let's all move to Arch Linux without any Window manager. And you have to write your own driver to use wifi. Death to user friendlyness! Advanced users only! /s

Try to create a PDF report with collapsible subheadings in Excel. After you have learned the necessary MacroScript and JavaScript to pull that off, writing a Wi-Fi driver will feel like a joke in comparison.

This! In my school time I usually worked around using any office tools which appeared way simpler for me than learning office tools. Statistics in ruby, markdown instead of word and I had the most beautiful CSS & html only presentations.

I was to 99% bound to editor and terminal and comfortable. In no world would a excel or word fit into my workflow

I still do, but today nobody is expecting me to use specific software anymore so it feels less rebellious

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

#130

Post by happymellon »

ranger_danger wrote: post #101
happymellon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they have a monopoly, places like the EU will frown on purposefully breaking compatibility. Its called antitrust.

> Purposefully According to who? With what proof? And how/why do they get to be the arbiters of that?

> According to who? With what proof?

They normally get asked to investigate by other interested parties, and then ask other independent experts in the field.

> And how/why do they get to be the arbiters of that?

By being the government?

Microsoft doesn't have to sell their software in Europe if they don't like the rules.

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