141–150 of 161 posts
I guess OP wasn't around back then when Microsoft openly bribed African countries to join ISO just to vote on this topic. This says it all: https://cdn.imgpile.com/p/RppGj1l
Direct quote from the article.
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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).
OOXML was the other way around: Microsoft had a standard and tried to enshrine into a standard and force others to waste time and resources to be compatible.
> 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…
Complexity alone would just make it laborious to implement, but the underspecification and subtle deviations of Microsoft’s implementation makes it virtually impossible to achieve full compatibility.
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…
Oh, and while 39448.5 is fine, 39448.0 makes Excel throw an error and refuse the whole document. Midnight January 1st 2008 is just 39448. The parser cannot handle 39448.0.
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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.
What if they could do it, because people like you had quit?
Quite often I find that if people stopped holding fundamentally broken dynamics together and just let the thing fail and fail hard, the overall long term outcome would be better off. Much to the opposite of your suggestion.
It's just that turns out, things being properly bodied or properly broken take coordinated action. People deciding one by one, one way or the other, is what actually enables and sustains pathological dynamics like this.
But then how does one single out any specific decision? Well, nohow, not with any rigor for sure.
> 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.
I love this screen that shows you exactly why they named it “Office Open” XML: https://i.imgur.com/hnj3sdv.png It was a pretty big deal when OpenOffice.org's 2.0 release came with OpenDocument as the default file format. Very easy for someone to misread this MSOffice screen and click on OOXML expecting it to mean OO.o.
Oh wow. I must have clicked through that page dozens of times, selecting "Keep Current" after a quick scan and thinking the 2nd option was talking about Open Office.
I have to wonder what sort of psychologists they employ who come up with ideas like aligning the “Word, Excel, PowerPoint” word column in the first selection with “Open” in the second selection so you read that word first and backtrack left to “Office”. Or maybe it's just a happy accident lol
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Some myths just won't die. OOXML is complex because it has to be. It has to losslessly round trip through an open format every single feature of Office. That's a lot of features. Yes, it's complex. Should Microsoft have cut features of Office just to make OOXML simpler? That's ridiculous. What about users who relied on those cut features? It was fair to ask Microsoft to open the file format. It wasn't fair to expect…
> OOXML is complex because it has to be. What it didn't have to be is sections upon sections of "this behaviour is as seen in Word 95", "this behaviour is as seen in Word 97" without any further specification or context. The main struggle for independent implementors was reverse engineering all the implicit and explicit assumptions and inner workings of MS Office software. > But admitting that would have been hard. E…
The office relies on behaviour in windows itself "a lot". Even office mac or office web they made themselves isn't a 1:1 replica of the office on windows.
Let alone describe it as a standard.
"this behaviour is as seen in Word 95" sounds sloppy, but it is indeed the closest they can get.
Or what else can you do? You can't just also ship a installation media of word 95 and windows into the ISO standard, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OOXML is complex because it has to be. What it didn't have to be is sections upon sections of "this behaviour is as seen in Word 95", "this behaviour is as seen in Word 97" without any further specification or context. The main struggle for independent implementors was reverse engineering all the implicit and explicit assumptions and inner workings of MS Office software. > But admitting that would have been hard. E…
> "this behaviour is as seen in Word 95", "this behaviour is as seen in Word 97" The office relies on behaviour in windows itself "a lot". Even office mac or office web they made themselves isn't a 1:1 replica of the office on windows. Let alone describe it as a standard. "this behaviour is as seen in Word 95" sounds sloppy, but it is indeed the closest they can get. Or what else can you do? You can't just also ship…
That's what they almost literally did. The spec is littered with "behavior of this program that has no specification and to see it you need to install it and run it"
And that's on top of re-inventing a bunch of specs in MS-only and MS-specific manner (like dates, for example)