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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

#51

Post by piker »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #49
piker wrote: post #18

This is a dupe from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 but I'll repeat what I said over there. I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under p…

LO is at least as functional as some other market leading SaaS word processors. LO could spin their product into a cloud application and not at all be "toast", because people in separate walled gardens no longer expect interoperability. As for complexity, an illustration-- while using M365 I recently was confounded by a stretch of text that had background highlighting that was neither highlight markup, not paragraph…

Agreed, but the point the author is missing is that complexity doesn't exist due to deliberate corporate lock in, but because the product is 40 years old and has had 10-11 ways to do just about everything it does. Unfortunately, as your case illustrates, there are still documents in the wild that depend on these legacy features. So to render with 100% fidelity, you end up in a sprawling web of complexity. Microsoft can afford to navigate that web (and already owns it). It's neigh impossible for an open-source product to do so.

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

#53

Post by fxtentacle »

bboygravity wrote: post #32
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

Try to create a PDF report with collapsible subheadings in Excel. After you have learned the necessary MacroScript and JavaScript to pull that off, writing a Wi-Fi driver will feel like a joke in comparison.

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

#56

Post by lcnielsen »

Ekaros wrote: post #45
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.

Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience... Ofc, if we stop really caring what things look like we could save lot of energy and time. Just go back to pure HTML without any JavaScript or CSS...

> Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience...

Having written many papers, reports and my entire Ph. D. thesis in Latex, and also moved between LaTeX classes/templates when changing journals... I'm inclined to agree to an extent. I think every layout system has a final hand-tweaking component (like inline HTML in markdown for example), but LaTeX has a very steep learning curve once you go beyond the basic series of plots and paragraphs. There are so many tricks and hacks for padding and shifting and adjusting your layout, and some of them are "right" and others are "wrong" for really quite esoteric reasons (like which abstraction layer they work at, or some priority logic).

Of course in the end it's extremely powerful and still my favourite markup language when I need something more powerful than markdown (although reStructuredText is not so bad either). But it's really for professionals with the time to learn a layout system.

Then again there are other advantages to writing out the layout, when it comes to archiving and accessibility, due to the structured information contained in the markup beyond what is rendered. arXiv makes a point about this and forces you to submit LaTeX without rendering the PDF, so that they can really preserve it.

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

#57

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

Ekaros wrote: post #45
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.

Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience... Ofc, if we stop really caring what things look like we could save lot of energy and time. Just go back to pure HTML without any JavaScript or CSS...

Latex is just as bad as WYSIWYG, pure unadultered TeX is what real programmers use! Of course, real hardcore programmers just bathe their hard drives in showers of cosmic rays until just the right bits have flipped et voila!—document ready

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

#58

Post by deknos »

bob1029 wrote: post #12

This is a comical perspective to me. I've been ass-deep in core banking APIs where we generate service references from WSDL/XSDs. Some of the resulting codegen measures in the tens of megabytes for some files. I wouldn't even attempt to quantify the number of pages of documentation. And this is just for mid size US banking domain. Microsoft Office has to work literally everywhere for everything. The fact that it's on…

It's not only about the XML itself, but that microsoft really likes to change the standard any time opensource catches up.

and most of the time they do not use their open standard, but the other document type.

The artificial vendor lockin is real.

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

#59

Post by lcnielsen »

scarface_74 wrote: post #52

There have been third party support for importing and exporting Office documents as long as I can remember. It was part of Apple’s File Exchange extension in 1994. No one is locked into Office because of file formats.

> No one is locked into Offive because of file formats

A lot of people are locked in because those import/export features are typically imperfect (or perhaps the documents themselves are) and will badly and often "invisibly" (to the non-Office user) break something.

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

#60

Post by graemep »

happymellon wrote: post #55
catmanjan wrote: post #54

Does software that produces files have an obligation to provide interoperability?

When they have a monopoly, places like the EU will frown on purposefully breaking compatibility. Its called antitrust.

> When they have a monopoly, places like the EU will frown on purposefully breaking compatibility.

What exactly have they done about it?

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