Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

> If LibreOffice started from scratch

What do you mean though? Libreoffice wrote their application from scratch, did they not? And they managed to implement a superior serialization format, did they not? And they managed to get that format standardized without bribing and cheating, did they not?

What you're saying is akin to "those residents of banana republics are just frustrated capitalism (and a little help from the CIA) is beating democracy"

> We do need for-profit alternatives to Word

Why does it have to be for profit?

> 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 specifications document was so long that it would be difficult for anyone else to implement it properly. When the proposed standard was submitted through the usual track, experienced evaluators rejected it for many good reasons. Microsoft responded using a special override procedure in which its money buy the support of many of the voting countries, thus bypassing proper evaluation and demonstrating that ISO can be bought.

Both things can be true. It had a genuine purpose, but the fact that Microsoft will go out of its way to not implement anything better and less temperamental is an indication it's not really open. There's plenty of evidence of Microsoft dragging their feet at playing nice with the rest of the office ecosystem.

I'm not saying they shouldn't do that as a company maximizing shareholder value. But we should all collectively groan every time the topic comes up, not applaud them.

Microsoft seems to have known that they could ram basically anything through a standards body, so they presumably didn't bother to actually try and simplify the standard. Instead, it's basically an XML serialization of their older binary formats, complete with all of the quirks and bugs that have to be emulated for 100% compatibility.

To be fair, we're talking about a product line with over 35 years of history here. Cruft in the format builds up but can never be removed, so long as you commit to strong backwards compatibility - which Microsoft has always done.

Fun trivia: many of the old binary formats use a meta-format called OLE2 (Object Linking and Embedding). The file format is a FAT12 filesystem packed into a single file, with a FAT filesystem chain, file blocks aligned to a specific power-of-two size, etc. This made saving files very fast, but raised the possibility of internal fragmentation (where individual sub-files are scattered over many non-contiguous blocks); hence, users were recommended to "Save As..." periodically for large/complex files to optimize the internal storage.

I think this is definitely some weird attempt to justify a terrible piece of technological junk....

For all the hate people gave CSS, it was/is fantastic at its job. Word documents are an example of how you don't design a document, and how when a for profit org designs a thing (instead of standards and market pressures), you get a technological monstrosity...

To be clear, I don't think LibreOffice is great. Part of their issue, they were built as a way to "not pay" for office, and it turns out that no, volunteers don't really do a better job at implementing 1000 pages of nonsense that the people who came up with that spaghetti code in the first place...

We don't need that software anymore, though. If you use it, know we are looking at you like you are pulling out a physical paper phonebook to store your numbers in, or a less hurtfully but just as topically, a record or CD player...it is dinosaur technology that pretty much has no place in todays world...

So, they have a point, I don't disagree with them, however it probably would be better just to "admit defeat", get MS to open source their code for compat reasons, and work on something new that's not trying to write viruses on your computer better than paragraphs...