The OOXML fight is near and dear to my heart because, when it happened, I was a baby developer, and I cared about the issue for some reason I can barely recall, and I found an expert on the issue on Twitter. That guy would regularly tweet about everything that was going on and the problems with the spec and the shenanigans, and I was one of the, like, 20 people who was hanging on his every word. And sometimes he'd talk about bee keeping instead. It was my first introduction to Twitter at its best. You got these unfiltered whole views of the lives and concerns of real people who were, in part, experts at what you cared about. So sometimes you had to listen to them talk about other random stuff they thought was neat. And that's great!
Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
71–80 of 161 posts
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#72Earlier 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…
> OOXML is complex because it has to be. 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. E…
That stuff happens because Microsoft don't know what the behavior is. It's just a bit which forks Word down some ancient code path that nobody understands and isn't properly documented. Given the huge effort that would have gone into producing this thousand plus page specification, is understandable why the spec writers would have given up at times.
I expect most people posting on Hacker News would not be able to write a satisfactory specification for their own software if they are working a large legacy code base.
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#73Dead 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…
> We do need for-profit alternatives to Word, and I’m working on one in legal. Wow, big undertaking! What we really need, though, is a for-profit alternative to Excel, that's not Google. I think Excel is more of the Killer App than Word has ever been.
That's Apple Numbers.
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#74> 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…
You are wrong. Microsoft was not asked to open the file format. There was an open file format already accepted as an ISO standard, so now they needed to make their product compliant with an ISO standard because companies around the world were going to prioritise that in their purchases. They did everything they could to ensure that their format was both an ISO standard, and impossible for somebody else to implement.
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#75Earlier 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…
You are wrong. Microsoft was not asked to open the file format. There was an open file format already accepted as an ISO standard, so now they needed to make their product compliant with an ISO standard because companies around the world were going to prioritise that in their purchases. They did everything they could to ensure that their format was both an ISO standard, and impossible for somebody else to implement.
From the article,
> First, OOXML was, in material part, a defensive posture under intensifying antitrust and “open standards” pressure. Microsoft announced OOXML in late 2005 while appealing an adverse European Commission judgment centered on interoperability disclosures. Thus, it was only a matter of time before Office file compatibility came under the regulatory microscope. (The Commission indeed opened a probe in 2008.)
> Meanwhile, the rival ODF matured and became an ISO standard in May 2006. Governments, especially in Europe, began to mandate open standards in public procurement. If Microsoft did nothing, Office risked exclusion from government deals.
So... maybe they weren't directly asked to open their file format, but what then? Adopt ODF which is surely incompatible with their feature set, and... just corrupt every .doc file when converting into the new format? And also have to reimplement all their apps?
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#76Microsoft 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.…
"You have to standardize the format"
"OK we will standardize our serialization format"
It's... I guess malicious compliance, though also if you don't care about interop you're not going to try to abstract away your internal application structures, are you!
I appreciate the standard existing rather than it not existing. Trying to have the standard exist in this way has always felt like an uphill battle, and at least now there's _something_.
Just you will have a better time if you emulate how Office does things. But you have a bit more documentation to go along with it.
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#77> 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…
Both can be true at once. 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.
Sounds exactly like deliberate sabotage to me.
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> So you put extensions in the spec ... 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?
> Except for all the people who did implement it?
It was never fully implemented. LibreOffice has been trying since then and there are always problems.
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#79> 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…
But they did define two variants to get their standard approved in the fast track process.
The Transitional variant which is entirely backwards compatible is not fully defined in a way that others can implement without reverse engineering how Microsoft Office does things.
The Strict variant isn't totally compatible with all older binary formats but is fully defined.
Guess which one is the standard file format?
Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OOXML is complex because it has to be. 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. E…
That stuff happens because Microsoft don't know what the behavior is. It's just a bit which forks Word down some ancient code path that nobody understands and isn't properly documented. Given the huge effort that would have gone into producing this thousand plus page specification, is understandable why the spec writers would have given up at times. I expect most people posting on Hacker News would not be able to wri…
This is correct and there's no point fixing the bugs because it means the layout of the document will change.