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Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

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Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#41

Post by com2kid »

PaulHoule wrote: post #30

People who were developing "office" programs in the early 1990s were thinking about the problem of serializing arbitrary object graphs into documents to support technologies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding where you could embed an Excel spreadsheet inside a Word document or actually embedded any of a large range of COM objects into a Word document which on one hand is a really appealin…

> but you rarely hear "JSON sucks" because it gave up on graphs for trees

Except it also spawned a thousand custom formats that include $ref support of some type, so we are right back to having graphs. :-D

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#42

Post by taspeotis »

Off topic sorry but with all the comments discussing Office's size and age and technical baggage ... does anyone know how they pivoted from X million lines of code for a desktop application to running it on the web with all those collaboration features?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#43

Post by lmkg »

Gigachad wrote: post #38
themerone wrote: post #37

It's as complex as it needs to be to losslessly convert old binary office files. A better format would have made us geeks a lot happier, but the average user just wants things to work the way they always have.

My possibly incomplete understanding was that the original office file format was basically just raw dumps of the internal C data structures. Not designed or specified in any way. The XML version likely carries a lot of baggage having to be compatible with that.

They weren't "just" raw dumps of internal C structures. It takes careful design work to dump raw memory in a usable fashion. Consider: You can't just write a pointer to disk and then read it back next week.

Binary MS Office format is a phenomenal piece of engineering to achieve a goal that's no longer relevant: fast save/load on late-80's hard drives. Other programs took minutes to save a spreadsheet, Excel took seconds. It did this by making sure it's in-memory data structures for a document could be dumped straight to disk without transformation.

But yes, this approach carries a shitton of baggage. And that achievement is no longer relevant in a world where consumer hardware can parse XML documents on the fly.

I have heard it argued, though, that the "baggage" isn't the file format. It's actually the full historical featureset of Excel. Being backwards-compatible means being able to faithfully represent the features of old Excel, and the essential complexity of that far outweighs the incidental complexity of how those features were encoded.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#44

Post by abhinavk »

tracker1 wrote: post #17

I think the last part is probably the biggest thing holding them back IMO... I tend not to install MS Office products on my personal devices, I haven't run Windows on a personal device in a few years. I've mostly maintained just my resume in word or libre-office format for well over a decade. I can't tell you how many times the LO format lost formatting, or just messed up between version upgrades. Same goes for openi…

Have you tried setting MSWord's default save format to Strict OOXML for inter-operation with LibreOffice?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#45

Post by toast0 »

Gigachad wrote: post #39
piker wrote: post #3

Dead on. Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementati…

I feel like Libreoffice became largely irrelevant the day Google Docs came out. People put up with LO wonkyness because it was free and office was expensive. Google completely flipped the game and then cloud collaboration became everything.

I mean, multiplayer features are useful, but Google Docs is wonkier than LO. At least when LO loads a document, it's fully loaded.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#46

Post by nashashmi »

OOXML carries bloat from a full legacy doc file into a docx file. Readability was not the mission of the developers of the open format. Openness was the mission of the developers of the format. And they made it open enough.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#47

Post by unscaled »

piker wrote: post #3

Dead on. Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementati…

This may be nitpicking, but the complexity in OOXML is not "necessary", at least not in the sense of what Fred Brooks would call essential complexity. As OP clearly demonstrate, the complexity in OOXML is not artificial: there was never some grand conspiracy by Microsoft to create a format that competitors will find it hard to implement.

But very little of this complexity is necessary for a standard interoperable document file format. The background was that the EU started pushing for a standardized document exchange format, and several governments started implementing regulations requiring the use of this format — Microsoft now had some very big customers which urgently needed a feature: a standard document file format. Microsoft _could_ have implemented and submitted a new format that doesn't include slavishly reflect their in-memory object graph and legacy issues. Or they even could have just adopted ODF (shudder). But they've chosen the easy way, because, frankly, they probably just didn't have the time. They took the accidental complexity which was the hot mess Microsoft Office internals (like a buggy date format) and serialized it to disk. It was never an ideal solution, but this was quick to implement.

That's just a classic case of technical debt: Microsoft needed to deliver a feature fast, and they were willing to make compromises. The crazy political shenanigans Microsoft had executed to standardize their technical debt are ironically just another form of accidental complexity.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#48

Post by like_any_other »

piker wrote: post #3

Dead on. Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementati…

> LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model

Let's take a look at this "for-profit model" - is it just higher price outweighed by better product? lol:

Microsoft, after getting beat up in the press for making propietary extensions to the Kerberos protocol, has released the specifications on the web -- but in order to get it, you have to run a Windows .exe file which forces you agree to a click-through license agreement where you agree to treat it as a trade secret, before it will give you the .pdf file. Who would have thought that you could publish a trade secret on the web? - https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and...

Back in 2001, Be, Inc. managed to get BeOS pre-installed on one computer model from Hitachi. Just one. On the entire PC market. Microsoft forced Hitachi to drop the bootloader entry to hide BeOS from customers buying it. They enforced their monopoly over the only possible niche BeOS could find on the PC market, crushing Be, Inc. in the process. - https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w...

So why aren't there any dual-boot computers for sale? The answer lies in the nature of the relationship Microsoft maintains with hardware vendors. More specifically, in the "Windows License" agreed to by hardware vendors who want to include Windows on the computers they sell. This is not the license you pretend to read and click "I Accept" to when installing Windows. This license is not available online. This is a confidential license, seen only by Microsoft and computer vendors. You and I can't read the license because Microsoft classifies it as a "trade secret." The license specifies that any machine which includes a Microsoft operating system must not also offer a non-Microsoft operating system as a boot option. In other words, a computer that offers to boot into Windows upon startup cannot also offer to boot into BeOS or Linux. The hardware vendor does not get to choose which OSes to install on the machines they sell -- Microsoft does. - https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#49

Post by bawolff »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #13

I once digged through the 5000 page specification. There was a lot of useless stuff that only old Microsoft Word supported like WordArt items.

Does office no longer support word art?

When i was a kid,making cool wordart headers for school projects was like 50% of what we used office for.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#50

Post by unscaled »

lorenzohess wrote: post #22

> In my view, OOXML is indeed complex, convoluted, and obscure. But that’s likely less about a plot to block third-party compatibility and more about a self-interested negligence: Microsoft prioritized the convenience of its own implementation and neglected the qualities of clarity, simplicity, and universality that a general-purpose standard should have. The author only provides arguments for "self-interested neglig…

Unless we ever get the full archive of Microsoft emails, meeting minutes and recordings from all the secret microphones they didn't have in their meeting rooms, I don't think you can ever disprove this claim. It's generally impossible to conclusively disprove conspiracy theories, because you could always claim you're only showing there are no documents proving the conspiracy, but there are no documents disproving it.

The author is just implicitly appealing to Occam's razor here, as people often in face of accusations of a plot. They can show that Microsoft has backed the ANSI accreditation of ODF[1] and eventually implemented support for ODF import and export in Office, but that's not enough to prove there was no conspiracy.

Instead, the article just provides a very plausible explanation for the complexity in OOXML. Does this explanation thoroughly disprove the accusations of a plot? Clear not. Is it more plausible than a great plot to crush a bunch of competitors that had no market share and kill a better standard document format that Microsoft did end up implementing in Office? Yes. This is probably as far as we can get.

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/source/2007/05/16/microsoft-votes...

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