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Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

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Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#121

Post by itsthecourier »

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.

wow. thanks for sharing

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#122

Post by bayindirh »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #106
gregopet wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But people got blindsided by the new Microsoft propaganda.

This is sadly true. I tried to warn many young folks about VSCode, Copilot and whatnot, and they all laughed at me.

Now, they're not laughing either.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#123

Post by bayindirh »

If a standard which allows embedding closed-spec binary blobs even Microsoft can't implement perfectly from version to version is not a deliberate sabotage attempt, then I don't know what is.

This is Microsoft. Don't get distracted.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#124

Post by EdwardCoffin »

itsthecourier wrote: post #120
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

I think the point of the criticism I read was that the edit should have worked. There is no reason why the opaque mess following what was obviously a definition of the contents of the spreadsheet should even be there let alone be dependent on the original contents of the cells.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#125

Post by qcnguy »

mschuster91 wrote: post #91
qcnguy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Apple Numbers.

... which comes tied to macOS and with it Apple hardware. Neither play well in a shop that uses x86 Windows-only software, and Apple's switch to ARM hasn't made that easier.

So? The person I was replying to didn't impose any conditions beyond it being not Google.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#126

Post by qcnguy »

troupo wrote: post #82
qcnguy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That stuff happens because Microsoft don't know what the behavior is. It's just a bit which forks Word down some ancient code path that nobody understands and isn't properly documented. Given the huge effort that would have gone into producing this thousand plus page specification, is understandable why the spec writers would have given up at times. I expect most people posting on Hacker News would not be able to wri…

> That stuff happens because Microsoft don't know what the behavior is. They do. Or they did at the time. They literally had things like "save as Word 95" in their office suite. > Given the huge effort that would have gone into producing this thousand plus page specification, is understandable why the spec writers would have given up at times. Given the huge effort to produce it in unreasonable timeline they forced t…

> They literally had things like "save as Word 95" in their office suite.

And what do you think that setting did? Forked execution down an alternative no longer maintained codepath instead of the rewritten version that wasn't quite compatible.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#127

Post by amiga386 »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #85
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…

The format wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was. It couldn't have been standardized through the normal process. Similarly, pointing to it, afterwards, as if it were just as implementable as any other standardized format, was an act of deliberate sabotage.

The format itself is an act of sabotage. The format is basically Microsoft's internal formats for Office, with all their bugs and flags and features, for which Microsoft already owned the only working implementation that works correctly.

They completely rejected what standardisation processes _do_, which is to subject the format to scrutiny, criticism and change, to make it universally useful and implementable.

Microsoft absolutely did not do that. They rammed through their proprietary bullshit and slapped an "open standards!" label on it.

https://www.consortiuminfo.org/opendocument-and-ooxml/the-co...

> 2.15.3.26 footnoteLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement)

> This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 6.x/95/97) when determining the placement of the contents of footnotes relative to the page on which the footnote reference occurs. This emulation typically involves some and/or all of the footnote being inappropriately placed on the page following the footnote reference.

> [Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]

> Typically, applications shall not perform this compatibility. This element, when present with a val attribute value of true (or equivalent), specifies that applications shall attempt to mimic that existing word processing application in this regard.

The format was _written_ to include specifics that only matter for one product - Microsoft Office - and don't even reveal in that format how those specifics should be interpreted faithfully. This is of ZERO use to anyone looking to make interoperable software that can make use of this standard. And that's the point - it's NOT an open standard, it's quite deliberately Microsoft's proprietary and closed bullshit with "open" shat on top of it, and a paid-for endorsement by a standards body that completely detonated its own credibility by approving it.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#128

Post by eythian »

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…

I was not aware there was an RFC for CSV, but the concept of "simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV" is, in my experience, not something that exists. In a previous job, a chunk of my work was taking CSV files that were given to us and writing tooling to process them into a structured form for import elsewhere (typically we'd do a few test runs, and finally do a cut-over with final data, so it had to be scripted.)

During this I saw just about every variant of CSV and character encoding known to man, often inside the same file. Once I had a file that had UTF-8, MARC-8, Latin1, and (yes really) VT100 control codes. All in one file.

All in all, I'd prefer something that actually could be validated for some sort of correctness (this said, another time I got an XML export from some software that was invalid XML, so...)

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#129

Post by pjmlp »

rglullis wrote: post #105
pjmlp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Yes, Vulkan (Mantle was the idea), C (since C89), C++ (since C++89), OpenCL (after Apple gave it to Khronos).

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#130

Post by 1718627440 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #102
boricj wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't use MS Office, but does Excel seriously not simply show a dialog, where the user can select this and maybe even auto-detects it? That's what I'm used to from the "subpar clone" (/s) from the Document Foundation.
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