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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

#31

Post by charcircuit »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #8

The post is essentially reminding people that XML doesn’t magically equal openness. A schema can be “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement”, and in the case of Office 365 the spec runs to “over 8 000 pages” and uses deeply nested tags, overloaded elements and wildcards. The result is that only the vendor can feasibly implement it, which eliminates third‑party implementations and lets t…

>that few free‑software developers can afford to.

Considering how little most free software makes they can't afford to do a lot of things. It's not a hard bar to hit.

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

#32

Post by bboygravity »

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.

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

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

#33

Post by constantcrying »

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.

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 And the word paradigm of representing a document as a if it were a piece of paper is obsolete in many areas where it is still being used.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 Atlassian, with confluence, is a large force pushing companies away from documents as a representation of paper.

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

#34

Post by constantcrying »

another_twist wrote: post #14

How hard would it be to generate a parser for this spec with AI code gen ?

If a spec is "difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features" it is ridiculous to assume an AI could do an adequate job.

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

#35

Post by constantcrying »

khelavastr wrote: post #2

Does this person not understand XML serializers..?

Do you not understand that there is a difference between parsing something and implementing a specification? These are totally separate things.

Obviously parsing the XML is trivial. What is not trivial is what you do with parsed XML and what the parsed structure represents.

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

#36

Post by mawadev »

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.

Do HTML WYSIWYG editors ever lead to vendor locking?

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

#37

Post by ZiiS »

mawadev wrote: post #36
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.

Do HTML WYSIWYG editors ever lead to vendor locking?

Yes, Frontpage tried to lock reading to Internet Explorer and hosting to IIS several times. Even with the best will in the world switching editors lost fidelity.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

masa331 wrote: post #11
wvenable wrote: post #5

> Unfortunately, while an XML schema can be simple, it can also be unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features. One could now use that exact sentence to describe the most popular open document format of all: HTML and CSS.

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…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by mrweasel »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #8

The post is essentially reminding people that XML doesn’t magically equal openness. A schema can be “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement”, and in the case of Office 365 the spec runs to “over 8 000 pages” and uses deeply nested tags, overloaded elements and wildcards. The result is that only the vendor can feasibly implement it, which eliminates third‑party implementations and lets t…

The complaint that OOXML was overly complex was a criticism when Microsoft first introduced the format, but as you point out, it needed to be able to handle decades of old formatting rules back then already. While I'm sure that there are stuff in the format that Microsoft made needlessly complex, one has to remember that they still need to be able to maintain the code, so throwing in to many roadblocks for open source developers would likely come back to haunt them. Still we know they did just that with SMB, so why not with OOXML.

What surprises me is how well LibreOffice handles various file formats, not just OOXML. In some cases LibreOffice has the absolute best support for abandoned file formats. I'm not the one maintaining them, so it's easy enough for me to say "See, you managed just fine". It much be especially frustrating when you have the OpenDocument format, which does effectively the same thing, only simpler.

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

#40

Post by nikanj »

mawadev wrote: post #36
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.

Do HTML WYSIWYG editors ever lead to vendor locking?

HTML WYSIWYG editors lead to eldrich horrors, the likes of which haven’t been seen since someone tried parsing HTML with regex
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