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Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

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Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#131

Post by jeroenhd »

jesus_666 wrote: post #81
hdjrudni wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article, > First, OOXML was, in material part, a defensive posture under intensifying antitrust and “open standards” pressure. Microsoft announced OOXML in late 2005 while appealing an adverse European Commission judgment centered on interoperability disclosures. Thus, it was only a matter of time before Office file compatibility came under the regulatory microscope. (The Commission indeed opened a probe in…

Work with OpenDocument to get the necessary features into the next version of ODF while keeping national bodies informed about the status of that effort. In the meanwhile, allow Office to save (with reduced functionality) to ODF in order to fulfill the requirements of existing standards-oriented procurement processes. (Fun fact: They did the latter pretty quickly.) Here's what they shouldn't have done: Undermine ISO'…

>Work with OpenDocument

Why on earth would they want to do that? Because they hate having money? Because they suddenly decided that opening the market to competition would be more important than the billions they stood to lose?

These standards determine the tools people use to communicate with tax offices and other government institutions. Thanks to their efforts (supported by as much corruption as necessary), Microsoft didn't have to invent a new file format and would let people just use the file format everyone was already using for official business.

Office allows saving as ODF already and has supported it for ages. It was never about supporting open standards. This is all about corporate interests.

I can't think of a single "open" format designed by a large corporation that isn't "open" as a way to make more money.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#132

Post by jeroenhd »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #124
itsthecourier wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The obvious reason to have other stuff depend on the value of the cell would be to store a cache alongside the formulae. In a 300MiB XSLX, you don't want to evaluate every formula every time the spreadsheet is opened.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#133

Post by dfox »

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 specifications document was so long that it would be difficult for anyone else to implement it properly.

In contrast to ODF specification that is long, complex and written in such a terse way that it really does only specify what is a valid ODF file and not in any way what it means. Good luck implementing that without just copying whatever LibreOffice does.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#134

Post by jeroenhd »

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…

Storing dates as numbers in a spreadsheet has been a thing since the first spreadsheet program I know of. Microsoft picked "days since 1900". If you're on UNIX, you may prefer using "1199188800" instead.

Other than that, the difference is pretty minor. ODS is very verbose and stores the content of the cell twice for some reason, but the XML trees are essentially the same.

The best way for corporate interaction is to export to whatever the hell Microsoft Excel accepts as an external data source, because .xslx files can natively import remote data that way. Hope your customers' computers are all configured for en_US mode, though, because CSVs aren't as universal as people pretend they are.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#135

Post by EdwardCoffin »

jeroenhd wrote: post #132
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The obvious reason to have other stuff depend on the value of the cell would be to store a cache alongside the formulae. In a 300MiB XSLX, you don't want to evaluate every formula every time the spreadsheet is opened.

If caches have a place in a file storage format, they should at least be optional and separate from mandatory content, and I got the impression from the critique that they were neither.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#136

Post by happymellon »

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 can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure that Pages was "corrupting" docx files because Apple followed the spec to a tee, and it turned out that Office didn't actually follow the spec that they had published.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#137

Post by hoistbypetard »

fsflover wrote: post #86
hoistbypetard wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was. Why not both? You didn't provide any arguments against it.

What I mean is that it is just the internal binary format they were using before, converted to XML. I don't believe the file format was developed as an act of sabotage; it was just some internal shit they were using because that's how the product had evolved.

Standardizing it as if it were an actual designed, open standard, was, however, very much an act of sabotage.

That's my read, anyway.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#138

Post by hoistbypetard »

amiga386 wrote: post #127
hoistbypetard wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Micro…

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

We are agreeing, I think. I was saying that the format was not developed as an act of sabotage. Ramming that format through standardization (without, as you note, doing any of the things standardization *should do*) so it could plausibly be labeled an open standard was the act of sabotage, IMO.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#139

Post by happymellon »

qcnguy wrote: post #126
troupo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which shouldn't be in an open spec...
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