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Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

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Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#151

Post by troupo »

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 Forked execution down an alternative no longer maintained codepath instead of the rewritten version that wasn't quite compatible.

Ah yes. All the changes made to word just continued to work magically when "forked down an alternative codepath no one knew about".

And if that's the case, why was that specified in OOXML?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#152

Post by pjmlp »

rglullis wrote: post #142
pjmlp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So, no. None of your examples are equivalent to OOXML. The implementations were first opened up and then standardized. 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.

Only if you ignore what was standardised in PDF form and only later made available on existing implementations.

That is why I explicitly made references to specific versions as turning points, as I expected the usual FOSS advocacy replies.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#153

Post by kiicia »

1718627440 wrote: post #130
Freak_NL wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It mostly did that until they changed it few versions ago, now it sometimes does, sometimes does not and sometimes falls flat on face depending on exact context of your action…

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#154

Post by ranger_danger »

clort wrote: post #74
quotemstr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are wrong. Microsoft was not asked to open the file format. There was an open file format already accepted as an ISO standard, so now they needed to make their product compliant with an ISO standard because companies around the world were going to prioritise that in their purchases. They did everything they could to ensure that their format was both an ISO standard, and impossible for somebody else to implement.

What companies around the world were prioritizing open standard file formats?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#155

Post by tannhaeuser »

quotemstr wrote: post #54
tannhaeuser wrote: post #20

Worth keeping in mind that the native MSO formats were using "structured storage", a horrible binary chunked serialization and metadata format from an era where binary embedding of document streams in other application documents via "Object linking and embedding" (OLE, see also Apple's OpenDoc format) was deemed desirable, with zero consideration given to third-party apps and segment formats tied to C++ data structur…

Can you explain what's wrong with the concept of a container format that allows embedding subdocuments of different types? > zero consideration given to third-party apps and segment formats The reality is the opposite. COM serialization was specifically built to allow for composing components (and serializations thereof) that didn't know about each other into a single document. That's why it leans so heavily on GUIDs…

> Can you explain what's wrong with the concept of a container format that allows embedding subdocuments of different types?

A system managing opaque streams with handler apps registered via GUIDs is pretty much antithetical to open formats for data exchange.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#156

Post by quotemstr »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #155
quotemstr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what's wrong with the concept of a container format that allows embedding subdocuments of different types? > zero consideration given to third-party apps and segment formats The reality is the opposite. COM serialization was specifically built to allow for composing components (and serializations thereof) that didn't know about each other into a single document. That's why it leans so heavily on GUIDs…

> Can you explain what's wrong with the concept of a container format that allows embedding subdocuments of different types? A system managing opaque streams with handler apps registered via GUIDs is pretty much antithetical to open formats for data exchange.

Are you suggesting that a document format should be a monolithic controlled by one organization and is actually more open than one that allows multiple entities to contribute to an artifact without permission or coordination? You can think that if you want, but you have to actually argue for it, not just assert it, because to me, that's closed, not open.

Or is it that you just really hate UUIDs? Me too, man. Should have gone with reverse DNS. It's a technical and aesthetic quibble though.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#157

Post by mmis1000 »

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…

> save as Word 95

This is for format only and a lossy conversion.

Line break or whatever finer behaviour isn't preserved perfectly.

Or probably any conversion between different office version is a lossy conversion.

They (microsoft) truly don't know how their format behaves exactly at any time I believe.

Even office for mac or office for web behaves slightly different.

I don't believe they have a true spec (A pixel perfect one) about word document. Or they should use it on their office mac or office web first.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#158

Post by CobrastanJorji »

fsflover wrote: post #88
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #71

The OOXML fight is near and dear to my heart because, when it happened, I was a baby developer, and I cared about the issue for some reason I can barely recall, and I found an expert on the issue on Twitter. That guy would regularly tweet about everything that was going on and the problems with the spec and the shenanigans, and I was one of the, like, 20 people who was hanging on his every word. And sometimes he'd ta…

> and I cared [...] and I found an expert So did you somehow contribute to it in the end?

Nope! I consumed content, felt informed, and did nothing to help anything. It's a tradition that I and many like me keep to this day.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#159

Post by taftster »

qcnguy wrote: post #125
mschuster91 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

Adding Apple to implied conditions. :)

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#160

Post by etothepii »

rhdunn wrote: post #9
etothepii wrote: post #4

I spent a lot of time last year replicating every valid Excel number format. I've really struggled to find good documentation on the excel format when you really get into the weeds. The use of namespaces is also incredibly annoying in so far as I can tell in every xml library I can find they really aren't well supported for that "human" readable component. When you crack open the file it feels like you are going to b…

What language? In Python, the `find`, `findall`, etc. methods take a namespace dictionary. E.g. result = doc.findall("//w:t", namespaces={"w": "..."}) In C# you can do: var navigator = doc.Root!.CreateNavigator(); nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(navigator.NameTable); nsManager.AddNamespace("w", "..."); var results = doc.Root?.XPathSelectElements("//w:t", nsManager); In Java you need to enable a namespace-aware fl…

Yes I'm talking Python. The namespaces are long, dare I say ugly, urls. Even though the xml file itself uses `<w:t` you can't unless you provide a dictionary as an argument that contains `{"w":"https://...."}` which means that you need to do a bunch of reading and understanding before you can start playing with the files.
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