61–70 of 161 posts
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.
[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/insert-wordart-c5...
> 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…
> 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…
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…
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.…
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
Another XML standard from MS that also seems relatively simple is XPS, a PDF alternative. But it uses Open Packaging and that is somewhat hard to read.
> 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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Office does still support word art. [0] [0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/insert-wordart-c5...
It might be a Swedish thing, but I always laugh when I see them. Not nearly as common today as ten years ago, but I see them a couple of times a year.
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…
So you put extensions in the spec you don’t make it impossible for anyone else to implement. They knew open source suites were competing with them they did it on purpose.
... which are either public, in which case people complain that the spec+extensions is too long instead of that the spec is too long, or
... which aren't public, in which case people complain that there's no interoperability.
You can't win.
> impossible for anyone else to implement
Except for all the people who did implement it?
> 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…
They didn't want a standard other people could adapt easily nor do the work to make Word adhere to one and it had to happen fast. By doing it the way they did they got everything they wanted and only needed to buy ISO.
> 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…
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…
What it didn't have to be is sections upon sections of "this behaviour is as seen in Word 95", "this behaviour is as seen in Word 97" without any further specification or context.
The main struggle for independent implementors was reverse engineering all the implicit and explicit assumptions and inner workings of MS Office software.
> But admitting that would have been hard. Easier to come up with conspiracy theories.
I actually read through a lot of that spec at the time. A lot of it was just lip service to open standards at a time when MS was under a lot of regulatory pressure.