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

like XML is a mark up language so it _should_ interleave quite "naturally" and well for text formatting tasks (i.e. see OpenDocument example or supper simple "ancient style" HTML)

but OOXML looks more like someone force serialized some live OOP object hierarchy with (potential cyclic) references and tone of subclasses etc.

tl;dr: i.e. it looks a loot similar to a simplified form of how text editors internal represent formatted test

like w:r looks like a text section, you could say a r_ow of wide characters or words, w:p looks like a subclass of a implicit type which is basically a `Vec`, w:pPr looks like ".presentation" property of w:p, same for w:rPr, probably both being subtypes of some generic Presentation base class. w:t looks like a generic `.text: String` property. w:pStyle looks like a property of Presentation or it's ParagraphPresentation sub-class, it's `w:val` property makes it look like it's a shared reference which can be looked up by the key `"Para"`. w:b is just another subclass of Presentation you can use in any context etc.

which opens the question

"do they mostly just dump their internal app state"?

and did they make their format that over-complicated and "over" flexible so that they can just change their internal structure and still dump it?

which would also explain how they might have ended up with "accidentally" incorrectly implementing their own standard around 10 years ago during early OOXML times

and if so isn't that basically "proof" that OOXML isn't really an open format but just a "make pretend" of one?

In my experience you do that more in Word then in Latex (the I added some paragraphs here and wtf is that picture two pages later doing now problem).

The issue is to some degree quite fundamental to the underlying challenges of laying out formatted text with embedded things, affecting both word and LaTex.

through that is assuming you now how to properly use Word / LaTex if you don't you can cause yourself a huge amount of work ;)

Back in the early 2000's I wrote readers and writers for it and made pretty heavy use of the format at my job at the time.

The biggest problem with SpreadsheetML was that it expected the extension to be .XML - Microsoft had some sort of magic that would still associate the files with Excel on Windows but it wasn't super reliable. We started using .xls but after an update Excel started barking about files with the wrong extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpreadsheetML

This is just not right.

They where not required (AFIK) and in some edge cases also didn't provide a perfect conversion of all old documents to the open format. Actually even just converting between different versions of their proprietary formats had a tendency to break things sometimes! (back then)

> unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

(EDIT: actually 2006, so uh, maybe XML hype) we speak about ~2010, the hype was pretty dead again at that time, and the main reason they choose it is to position it as "completion" to emerging standardized open office document formats which all used XML as markup language (except they don't really use XML as mark down language but more like serialization to JSON but way more complex, but that doesn't matter they mostly need to convince not supper tech affine people about them "no longer trying to hamper competition" to preclude legislative action and governments from switching to other office suites due to the closed format making them worry).

so they where more then able to

- do a clean design, if anyway a lot of old "proprietary" documents break subtly when converting it doesn't matter (and they did break)

- just adopt OpenDocument format

depends

you can have well, clean and fully documented binary formats which are relatively easy to parse (e.g. msgpack, cbor, bson)

you might still not know what the parsed things mean, but that also applies to text formats (including random documented binary blob fields, thanks to base64 they also fit into any text format)