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

Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

hsu.cy

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 161 posts

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#81

Post by jesus_666 »

hdjrudni wrote: post #75
clort wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Work with OpenDocument to get the necessary features into the next version of ODF while keeping national bodies informed about the status of that effort. In the meanwhile, allow Office to save (with reduced functionality) to ODF in order to fulfill the requirements of existing standards-oriented procurement processes. (Fun fact: They did the latter pretty quickly.)

Here's what they shouldn't have done: Undermine ISO's credibility by ramming a hastily-constructed, not-yet-implemented spec through a fast-track process intended for mature specs by stuffing national bodies. I see no reason to place Microsoft's short term profits over the integrity of international standards bodies, nor do I see one to excuse Microsoft for doing so.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#82

Post by troupo »

qcnguy wrote: post #72
troupo wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

> That stuff happens because Microsoft don't know what the behavior is.

They do. Or they did at the time. They literally had things like "save as Word 95" in their office suite.

> 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.

Given the huge effort to produce it in unreasonable timeline they forced themselves into due to regulatory pressure, sure.

The whole OOXML came about only because some large governments said "well, we don't want to be beholden to black box document formats, and we might want a selection of vendors in the future, so ODF looks like a nice proposition compared to Word, actually".

So it was literally rushed through Ecma. MS submitted 2000 pages in December 2005, the spec grew to 6000 pages over the course of the yer, and got standardised in December 2006. So, only a year to significantly increase the spec and standardize it.

And then it was rushed through the ISO standards track which included things like "Swedish vote declared invalid, accusing MS of manipulating votes" https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Swedish-OpenXML-V... or "Netherlands automatically abstains from voting due to Microsoft" https://archive.ph/20120711220944/http://isoc.nl/michiel/nod... or "near unanimous 'No with comments' turned into 'Abstain' from Malaysia" https://web.archive.org/web/20090726171905/http://www.openma... or...

Google said it best: https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth008/odf/google_ooxml.pdf

--- start quote ---

In developing standards, as in other engineering processes, it is a bad idea to reinvent the wheel. The OOXML standard document is 6546 pages long. The ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages. The reason for this is that ODF references other existing ISO standards for such things as date specifications, math formula markup and many other needs of an office document format standard. OOXML invents its own versions of these existing standards, which is unnecessary and complicates the final standard.

If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison.

Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising.

--- end quote ---

Do not for a second assume that anything about OOXML was done in good faith. Well, apart from the thankless work that people assembling the standard did.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#84

Post by thomasfl »

s20n wrote: post #53

> 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…

I worked for the Norwegian standard organization at the time. After seing with my own eyes how Microsoft was able to get OOXML approved, I quit doing standards. The OOXML standard is a joke. Three different ways to store basically the exact same thing. Like dates.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#85

Post by hoistbypetard »

s20n wrote: post #53

> 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 format wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was. It couldn't have been standardized through the normal process. Similarly, pointing to it, afterwards, as if it were just as implementable as any other standardized format, was an act of deliberate sabotage.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#86

Post by fsflover »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #85
s20n wrote: post #53

> 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 format wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was. It couldn't have been standardized through the normal process. Similarly, pointing to it, afterwards, as if it were just as implementable as any other standardized format, was an act of deliberate sabotage.

> The format wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was.

Why not both? You didn't provide any arguments against it.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#87

Post by fsflover »

thomasfl wrote: post #84
s20n wrote: post #53

> 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…

I worked for the Norwegian standard organization at the time. After seing with my own eyes how Microsoft was able to get OOXML approved, I quit doing standards. The OOXML standard is a joke. Three different ways to store basically the exact same thing. Like dates.

What if they could do it, because people like you had quit?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#88

Post by fsflover »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #71

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 ta…

> and I cared [...] and I found an expert

So did you somehow contribute to it in the end?

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#89

Post by thomasfl »

fsflover wrote: post #87
thomasfl wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for the Norwegian standard organization at the time. After seing with my own eyes how Microsoft was able to get OOXML approved, I quit doing standards. The OOXML standard is a joke. Three different ways to store basically the exact same thing. Like dates.

What if they could do it, because people like you had quit?

I was new in the standards business. Believed this was common. Understand now that it wasn't.

Re: Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

#90

Post by mschuster91 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #20

Worth keeping in mind that the native MSO formats were using "structured storage", a horrible binary chunked serialization and metadata format from an era where binary embedding of document streams in other application documents via "Object linking and embedding" (OLE, see also Apple's OpenDoc format) was deemed desirable, with zero consideration given to third-party apps and segment formats tied to C++ data structur…

IIRC Adobe's PSD file format is similar, which made it very very complex to reverse engineer on one side - and vulnerable to exploits on the other side.
Post reply on HN