Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.documentfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 131 posts

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

#81

Post by grahameb »

mrweasel wrote: post #39
cranberryturkey wrote: post #8

The post is essentially reminding people that XML doesn’t magically equal openness. A schema can be “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement”, and in the case of Office 365 the spec runs to “over 8 000 pages” and uses deeply nested tags, overloaded elements and wildcards. The result is that only the vendor can feasibly implement it, which eliminates third‑party implementations and lets t…

The complaint that OOXML was overly complex was a criticism when Microsoft first introduced the format, but as you point out, it needed to be able to handle decades of old formatting rules back then already. While I'm sure that there are stuff in the format that Microsoft made needlessly complex, one has to remember that they still need to be able to maintain the code, so throwing in to many roadblocks for open sourc…

A friend had a book she'd written in a Mac version of word from the early 90s; none of the current Microsoft versions of Word (windows, mac, web) would read it, but Libreoffice worked fine, so a little script later using Libreoffice's CLI tools and it was all converted, pretty much intact.

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

#82

Post by acdha »

perching_aix wrote: post #78
acdha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, technical documents are long but that still doesn’t support the original claim that they are “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted” and it’s actually evidence against the assertion that they’re “difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features”: most of why those are long documents is that they carefully detail how necessarily complex systems interact in sufficient detail to implement the…

The original claim was clearly actually just an opinion; I don't think there's merit to treating it as a series of logical statements, or at intricate depth in general. Evidence for this is in the very words used: unnecessary, complex, bloated, convoluted. These are very human terms that are thus subject to personal interpretation and opinions. It shouldn't be surprising then that their "claim" thus fails scrutiny. A…

Of course it’s an opinion: the point is that it’s neither persuasive nor internally inconsistent. They haven’t given any reason to believe they have enough domain knowledge to compare the two authoritatively. It’s also inconsistent to criticize OOXML for being difficult to implement without extra knowledge and then to criticize a truly open spec for being detailed enough to implement without extra – the entire HTML5 process was intended to reduce the number of cases where people were relying on things which required implementers to know how a specific engine like IE worked.

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

#83

Post by 72deluxe »

masa331 wrote: post #11
wvenable wrote: post #5

> Unfortunately, while an XML schema can be simple, it can also be unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features. One could now use that exact sentence to describe the most popular open document format of all: HTML and CSS.

Can you be more specific here? HTML and CSS can't be described like that in my opinion. It is complex but not complicated. You can start with just a few small parts and get to a usable and clean document within hours from the first contact with the languages. The tags and rules are usually quite self-describing while consice and there are tons and tons of good docs and tools. The development of the standards is also…

Since HTML is valid XML, it really is perfectly acceptable to say it's the same!

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

#84

Post by mannycalavera42 »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #57
Ekaros wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am a pro when it comes to M-x butterfly

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

#85

Post by folbec »

flohofwoe wrote: post #41

I don't even think it's intentional, they had to come up with a file format which supports all the weird historical artefacts in the various Office tools. They didn't have the luxury to first come up with a clean file format and then write the tools around it. And I bet they didn't switch to XML because it was superior to their old file formats, but simply because of the unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short…

Exactly, there is no need for nefarious intentions, when time constraint et mild incompetence suffice.

The OOXML format is likely a not very deeply thought out XML serialization of the in memory structure or of the old binary format, done under time pressure (there was legal pressure on Microsoft at the time).

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

#86

Post by Someone »

_the_inflator wrote: post #72
jonathaneunice wrote: post #65

I wish this article had shown side-by-side examples. Back when I built document transformation tools as part of a publishing pipeline, the simplicity and clarity benefit of OpenDocument's XML over Microsoft's OOXML were *staggering* in practice. A beautiful, clean, logical approach vs beyond-Byzantine cruft and complexity at every turn. I don't remember every element enough to render from memory, but ChatGPT's exampl…

By accident, I saw firsthand how a simple layout, such as a page and a few paragraphs, can make you question why formats like Markdown are even possible, because the number one text processing tool would throw such a gigantuan load of crude syntax at you for a few paragraphs. Respect to MS for keeping the lights on. People need to understand that there is no MS format per se, but different standards from which you ca…

> And I bet that MS intended such a complicated format to prevent Open Source Projects from developing parsers and MS from losing market share this way.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it simply was “the XML schema mostly follows how our implementation represents this kind of stuff”.

The source code of MS Word almost certainly has lots of now weird-looking design choices based on having to run in constrained memory. It also has dark corners for “we released a version that did this slightly different, so we have to keep supporting it”

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

#87

Post by piker »

graemep wrote: post #60
happymellon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Without knowing too much of the EU history, I have always understood that anti-trust pressure from the EU effectively forced Microsoft to publish the OOXML spec in the first place.

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

#88

Post by dathinab »

jonathaneunice wrote: post #65

I wish this article had shown side-by-side examples. Back when I built document transformation tools as part of a publishing pipeline, the simplicity and clarity benefit of OpenDocument's XML over Microsoft's OOXML were *staggering* in practice. A beautiful, clean, logical approach vs beyond-Byzantine cruft and complexity at every turn. I don't remember every element enough to render from memory, but ChatGPT's exampl…

I wonder how much of this is related accidental grown complexity (in their original closed format) and their WYSIWYG just doing dump stuff devs aren't sure how or why it ended that way but also don't want to touch least it breaks.

Which they then carried over into OOXML.

Just to be clear, MS has back then and recently again repeatedly shown very clearly they the whole embrace extend extinguish thing is the core of their action for most things open or standardized(1). And what is a better way to "extinguish" open text standards by making one themself which is build in a way guaranteed to not work well, i.e. fail, for anyone(/most) but first party MS products and then use that to push the propaganda fud that open text standards just can't be good.

So I'm very sure them having an obscure, hyper complex, OOXML "open standard" format where actually implementing it standard compliant is far from sufficient for correct displayed/interpreted documents is a very intentional thing.

But if you already have a mess internally it is a very good move to just use/expand on that, because it does give you a excuse why things ended up how they are and save implementation time.

----

(1): disclaimer: In between there where a view years where they acted quite friendly; Specific dev of MS still love Open Source in a honest way; in some areas open source also has won; and in some places it's just a very bad time vor "extend and extinguish" so it's not (yet) done; And sometimes it's done very slowly and creepingly; So yes you will find good MS open source project and contributions. But its still pretty much everywhere no matter in which direction you look as long as you look close enough.

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

#89

Post by dathinab »

_the_inflator wrote: post #72
jonathaneunice wrote: post #65

I wish this article had shown side-by-side examples. Back when I built document transformation tools as part of a publishing pipeline, the simplicity and clarity benefit of OpenDocument's XML over Microsoft's OOXML were *staggering* in practice. A beautiful, clean, logical approach vs beyond-Byzantine cruft and complexity at every turn. I don't remember every element enough to render from memory, but ChatGPT's exampl…

By accident, I saw firsthand how a simple layout, such as a page and a few paragraphs, can make you question why formats like Markdown are even possible, because the number one text processing tool would throw such a gigantuan load of crude syntax at you for a few paragraphs. Respect to MS for keeping the lights on. People need to understand that there is no MS format per se, but different standards from which you ca…

as far as I understand just parsing OOXML is by far not enough to get anywhere close to having a reasonable correct understanding of the layout of the document due to how it's "supper flexible" in ways going "beyond the OOXML standard", i.e. you still have to reverse engineer tone of things.

(i.e. they worked around the "XML is a strict format" part ;) )

or at least it was that way way back then when OOXML was new and the whole scandal about MS "happening" to not correctly implement their own standard thing was still news (so like 10+ years ago)

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

#90

Post by Voultapher »

yegle wrote: post #27
masa331 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific here? HTML and CSS can't be described like that in my opinion. It is complex but not complicated. You can start with just a few small parts and get to a usable and clean document within hours from the first contact with the languages. The tags and rules are usually quite self-describing while consice and there are tons and tons of good docs and tools. The development of the standards is also…

You could say the existing browser vendors pushed to make the HTML standard more complicated to the point that there's no chance for a newcomer to compete with the existing ones.

Ladybird would like a word.

Though I agree that the web standards are extremely large. Not sure if they are too large, given their cross-platform near OS layer functionality.

Post reply on HN