8 ms·

Microsoft Open XML embarrassment: spaces go missing between words

45 points by bensummers 16y ago

joelhaasnoot 16y ago
Noticed this the minute I installed the Office 2010 beta, but vice versa: the spaces from my Word 2007 document were gone. Made me go back to 2007: wasn't going to rewrite my 20 page report.
- dspillett 16y ago
  > Office 2010 beta > <sad story about a bug> > wasn't going to rewrite my 20 page report. And the moral of this story: don't use software that is officially of "beta" quality for important work. This is not specific to MS Office.
  - joelhaasnoot 16y ago
    You're absolutely right, but the best test there is is the real-life one. And I was prepared for this so could go back. No animals were hurt, no dogs were blamed for the homework, but it have a great first impression of the "improvement".
rbanffy 16y ago
I wouldn't know how to write this bug... It should serve as a testimony on how hard it is to implement Office Open XML. Not even Microsoft can get it right.
- Nitramp 16y ago
  Note that nobody implements Office Open XML as in the ISO standard. Microsofts implementation is incompatible to what ISO specified, mainly because in the ISO standardization process, ISO dropped some of the byzantine stuff in OOXML. Microsoft never adjusted its implementation to that, so AFAIK today there is no implementation of the standard in existence.
  - lsd5you 16y ago
    Which is what is so frustrating about major corporations and their approach to the law. Or rather how the law is enforced. Small deviations from speed limits are not particularly harmful, but small deviations from the standardisation process here or breaching insider information rules in banks make a mockery of the system. They can pass the infractions off as unavoidable incompetence, but really the system should not except these specious half-truth excuses in these circumstances and should come down much harder, sooner and more often.
    - recoiledsnake 16y ago
      It easy to say that, but the practical realities are different. This explains it better than what I can write: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
      - polynomial 16y ago
        I like how Joel explains the necessary reasons why the file formats in question have to be so bad, while tacitly admitting that having a good reason for being bad doesn't make bad code any more useful.
        recoiledsnake 16y ago
        The takeaway for me is that designing, developing and maintaining a full featured office suite is incredibly hard. And standardizing it is even harder. Look at all the teething problems that ODF had. OO.org/LibreOffice doesn't even conform fully to the ODF standard. See issues like http://www.zdnetasia.com/ooxml-expert-odf-standard-is-broken-62040931.htm http://www.zdnetasia.com/ooxml-expert-odf-standard-is-broken...
    - roel_v 16y ago
      "the law"?
      - 16y ago
- edanm 16y ago
  This might be a funny quip, but I disagree. Implementing anything is hard, and weird bugs creep in. I've never seen any program without bugs. So it's pretty disingenuous to take one bug in Word and say that it shows there's something wrong with Open XML.
  - axod 16y ago
    Over-engineering increases the likelihood of bugs. Simple and elegant = less bugs. XML is the epitome of over engineering.
    - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
      Of all the objectionable things about Microsoft's Office Open XML, the (mis-)use of XML is fairly far down the list. Trying to create a bug-compatible version of .doc is hard, as the sterling efforts of OpenOffice and others have shown. An attempt to create one in XML, by the very people who were best placed to just document the original format is way beyond good or bad engineering.
      - contextfree 16y ago
        They did publish documentation for the original formats (iirc around the same time they published the new XML formats), btw.
        ZeroGravitas 16y ago
        It was a few years later on, after some wrangling with the EU about their monopoly status.
    - wladimir 16y ago
      Representing documents should actually be one of the uses XML is suited for, and was the original intent. Prime example: HTML
      - 16y ago
- trezor 16y ago
  Where in the link supplied is there any evidence that this is a bug in the file-format? Before you jump on the bandwagon of cheap Microsoft-stabs, at least do some basic critical reading of the source you are relying on.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Do you have any other explanation?
    - recoiledsnake 16y ago
      Why is it so difficult to understand the difference between executable code and a 'standard' file format?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- JeremyBanks 16y ago
  Only post and account created: 11 minutes ago Flagging away.
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
"as I understand it a large part of the point of Open XML is to preserve fidelity in archived documents" No, the point was to preserve a monopoly. The stuff about preserving fidelity was just a smokescreen since anyone paying attention knows that Word has a long history of changing formatting depending on which printer you have plugged into a machine. If you want that kind of archival then use the PDF/A standard.
- brudgers 16y ago
  The main purpose of Open XML is to facilitate processing and creating documents programmatically using standard tools to manipulate the DOM. Considering the vastness of resources which exist across platforms for manipulating XML (including those for translating to and from XML schemas), this is hardly a proprietary move on Microsoft's part. If they wanted proprietary, they would have copyrighted the format as Autodesk did with the Revit file format.
  - Robin_Message 16y ago
    Look at the effect, not the justification: just when OO XML was being talked about being standardised, and .doc was more or less interoperable, Open XML comes out. It's an open standard, but it requires effort to convert to it. Microsoft has money to burn so it can do the conversion; its competitors cannot. Copyrighting the file format puts them in legal hot water: since it is a de facto standard, trying to prevent competition would likely violate anti-trust laws. This way they can appear to be open whilst being closed.
  - RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
    I don't know if you've actually examined the OOXML format, but I spent about 6 months dealing with it in great detail at my old job, specifically Excel. For simple things, conventional XML manipulation tools could potentially be useful, but there are some serious issues. For one thing, the files office generates and consumes are significantly different from the format as specified in the ECMA and ISO standards. The schemas for ECMA-376 will specify elements as occuring in any order, while Excel will require those elements to appear in a fixed order. Tons of tiny problems like this exist everywhere, and you only need one mistake to create a malformed document. The machine-readable XML schemas provided by Microsoft will not work without massaging. The format also makes it very difficult to make simple in-place changes. A good example of this is what you might consider the most basic information in a spreadsheet- cells. Cell tags are contained in row tags which are contained in a sheetData tag. Rows contain their row number as an attribute, while cells contain their A1 "row/column" ID. This means if you remove or reposition a row in a spreadsheet you must update every cell in every subsequent row. How about extracting a string value from a cell? The format makes it possible to store inline strings directly in a given cell, but Excel itself never uses this functionality. Instead, the cell contains an index into the SharedStringTable, which is stored as a separate XML document. If you delete or modify a cell, it might be referencing an SST entry that is no longer used. The only way to know is to search the document globally, remembering that dozens of different elements could potentially refer to a shared string. If your goal is to avoid bloating documents with junk, you have to solve this problem for a number of cases- style references, fonts and more. If you want to modify OOXML documents in a robust, thorough manner, you'll deal with tons of issues like this.
smackfu 16y ago
That is a pretty obscure test case. And I like how the "severe" impact this had was that someone got a bad grade on a paper.
- notahacker 16y ago
  Sending a file in the default format of the world's most popular word processor to another party who opens it on a computer with different settings and a slightly older version of world's most popular word processor doesn't sound especially obscure to me. I'm assuming most people that fail to get invited to job interviews because missing spaces make their resume/cv look careless to a prospective employer opening the file in Word 2007 probably aren't going to be aware of the reasons behind the decision...
  - smackfu 16y ago
    Well, it's not like the test case can say "different settings." The devil is in the details.
brudgers 16y ago
Link to original CNET article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20034213-92.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20034213-92.html Link to original thread on Microsoft forum: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordshare/thread/2764c5ac-4f7c-4a6d-9419-9e37bddf82d8 http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordshare/t...
trezor 16y ago
As far as I see this, he admits the problem at the end: Microsoft Word is a Word Processing program, not a publishing program. You are not guaranteed to have your layout preserved when printing. This can be for a variety of reasons, but it could be simple stuff like having your file in A4-format and your printer only having papers of type "Letter" or something equally silly. In cases like these, Word is forced to reformat. If you need or rely on a 100% accurate re-representation of your content, Word should not be your tool. Never. Use PDFs. Simple as that. If you are writing a normal texts however, it will probably never be a real problem which you will even notice. Now, my question to the author (should he check out HN): How on earth is this related to OOXML? Where is the smoking gun saying this is a bug in the file-format? I honestly don't see it, and I don't see anyone else here questioning this unbacked claim. I honestly expected better from HN.
- zzleeper 16y ago
  Check the article again. It's not about layout preserved when printing, it's about actual spaces being deleted in the editor and then kept deleted when you save the file.
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    Maybe I need to spell it for you and those downvoting the OP. The headline says 'Open XML' (implying a bug in the standard format) whereas the article is talking about Office 2007 and Office 2010. See the difference?
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      It's the implementation of the standard in Office 2007 and 2010
      - recoiledsnake 16y ago
        So a more appropriate title could be 'Microsoft's Office embarassment' ? Or not?
tzs 16y ago
This sounds like simply a bug in Word 2007 or Word 2010, not a problem with the document format.

45 points by bensummers 16y ago

Noticed this the minute I installed the Office 2010 beta, but vice versa: the spaces from my Word 2007 document were gone. Made me go back to 2007: wasn't going to rewrite my 20 page report.

dspillett 16y ago
> Office 2010 beta > <sad story about a bug> > wasn't going to rewrite my 20 page report. And the moral of this story: don't use software that is officially of "beta" quality for important work. This is not specific to MS Office.
- joelhaasnoot 16y ago
  You're absolutely right, but the best test there is is the real-life one. And I was prepared for this so could go back. No animals were hurt, no dogs were blamed for the homework, but it have a great first impression of the "improvement".

rbanffy 16y ago

I wouldn't know how to write this bug... It should serve as a testimony on how hard it is to implement Office Open XML. Not even Microsoft can get it right.

Nitramp 16y ago
Note that nobody implements Office Open XML as in the ISO standard. Microsofts implementation is incompatible to what ISO specified, mainly because in the ISO standardization process, ISO dropped some of the byzantine stuff in OOXML. Microsoft never adjusted its implementation to that, so AFAIK today there is no implementation of the standard in existence.
- lsd5you 16y ago
  Which is what is so frustrating about major corporations and their approach to the law. Or rather how the law is enforced. Small deviations from speed limits are not particularly harmful, but small deviations from the standardisation process here or breaching insider information rules in banks make a mockery of the system. They can pass the infractions off as unavoidable incompetence, but really the system should not except these specious half-truth excuses in these circumstances and should come down much harder, sooner and more often.
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    It easy to say that, but the practical realities are different. This explains it better than what I can write: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
    - polynomial 16y ago
      I like how Joel explains the necessary reasons why the file formats in question have to be so bad, while tacitly admitting that having a good reason for being bad doesn't make bad code any more useful.
      - recoiledsnake 16y ago
        The takeaway for me is that designing, developing and maintaining a full featured office suite is incredibly hard. And standardizing it is even harder. Look at all the teething problems that ODF had. OO.org/LibreOffice doesn't even conform fully to the ODF standard. See issues like http://www.zdnetasia.com/ooxml-expert-odf-standard-is-broken-62040931.htm http://www.zdnetasia.com/ooxml-expert-odf-standard-is-broken...
  - roel_v 16y ago
    "the law"?
    - 16y ago
edanm 16y ago
This might be a funny quip, but I disagree. Implementing anything is hard, and weird bugs creep in. I've never seen any program without bugs. So it's pretty disingenuous to take one bug in Word and say that it shows there's something wrong with Open XML.
- axod 16y ago
  Over-engineering increases the likelihood of bugs. Simple and elegant = less bugs. XML is the epitome of over engineering.
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    Of all the objectionable things about Microsoft's Office Open XML, the (mis-)use of XML is fairly far down the list. Trying to create a bug-compatible version of .doc is hard, as the sterling efforts of OpenOffice and others have shown. An attempt to create one in XML, by the very people who were best placed to just document the original format is way beyond good or bad engineering.
    - contextfree 16y ago
      They did publish documentation for the original formats (iirc around the same time they published the new XML formats), btw.
      - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
        It was a few years later on, after some wrangling with the EU about their monopoly status.
  - wladimir 16y ago
    Representing documents should actually be one of the uses XML is suited for, and was the original intent. Prime example: HTML
    - 16y ago
trezor 16y ago
Where in the link supplied is there any evidence that this is a bug in the file-format? Before you jump on the bandwagon of cheap Microsoft-stabs, at least do some basic critical reading of the source you are relying on.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Do you have any other explanation?
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    Why is it so difficult to understand the difference between executable code and a 'standard' file format?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

JeremyBanks 16y ago
Only post and account created: 11 minutes ago Flagging away.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

"as I understand it a large part of the point of Open XML is to preserve fidelity in archived documents" No, the point was to preserve a monopoly. The stuff about preserving fidelity was just a smokescreen since anyone paying attention knows that Word has a long history of changing formatting depending on which printer you have plugged into a machine. If you want that kind of archival then use the PDF/A standard.

brudgers 16y ago
The main purpose of Open XML is to facilitate processing and creating documents programmatically using standard tools to manipulate the DOM. Considering the vastness of resources which exist across platforms for manipulating XML (including those for translating to and from XML schemas), this is hardly a proprietary move on Microsoft's part. If they wanted proprietary, they would have copyrighted the format as Autodesk did with the Revit file format.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  Look at the effect, not the justification: just when OO XML was being talked about being standardised, and .doc was more or less interoperable, Open XML comes out. It's an open standard, but it requires effort to convert to it. Microsoft has money to burn so it can do the conversion; its competitors cannot. Copyrighting the file format puts them in legal hot water: since it is a de facto standard, trying to prevent competition would likely violate anti-trust laws. This way they can appear to be open whilst being closed.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
  I don't know if you've actually examined the OOXML format, but I spent about 6 months dealing with it in great detail at my old job, specifically Excel. For simple things, conventional XML manipulation tools could potentially be useful, but there are some serious issues. For one thing, the files office generates and consumes are significantly different from the format as specified in the ECMA and ISO standards. The schemas for ECMA-376 will specify elements as occuring in any order, while Excel will require those elements to appear in a fixed order. Tons of tiny problems like this exist everywhere, and you only need one mistake to create a malformed document. The machine-readable XML schemas provided by Microsoft will not work without massaging. The format also makes it very difficult to make simple in-place changes. A good example of this is what you might consider the most basic information in a spreadsheet- cells. Cell tags are contained in row tags which are contained in a sheetData tag. Rows contain their row number as an attribute, while cells contain their A1 "row/column" ID. This means if you remove or reposition a row in a spreadsheet you must update every cell in every subsequent row. How about extracting a string value from a cell? The format makes it possible to store inline strings directly in a given cell, but Excel itself never uses this functionality. Instead, the cell contains an index into the SharedStringTable, which is stored as a separate XML document. If you delete or modify a cell, it might be referencing an SST entry that is no longer used. The only way to know is to search the document globally, remembering that dozens of different elements could potentially refer to a shared string. If your goal is to avoid bloating documents with junk, you have to solve this problem for a number of cases- style references, fonts and more. If you want to modify OOXML documents in a robust, thorough manner, you'll deal with tons of issues like this.

smackfu 16y ago

That is a pretty obscure test case. And I like how the "severe" impact this had was that someone got a bad grade on a paper.

notahacker 16y ago
Sending a file in the default format of the world's most popular word processor to another party who opens it on a computer with different settings and a slightly older version of world's most popular word processor doesn't sound especially obscure to me. I'm assuming most people that fail to get invited to job interviews because missing spaces make their resume/cv look careless to a prospective employer opening the file in Word 2007 probably aren't going to be aware of the reasons behind the decision...
- smackfu 16y ago
  Well, it's not like the test case can say "different settings." The devil is in the details.

brudgers 16y ago

Link to original CNET article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20034213-92.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20034213-92.html Link to original thread on Microsoft forum: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordshare/thread/2764c5ac-4f7c-4a6d-9419-9e37bddf82d8 http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordshare/t...

trezor 16y ago

As far as I see this, he admits the problem at the end: Microsoft Word is a Word Processing program, not a publishing program. You are not guaranteed to have your layout preserved when printing. This can be for a variety of reasons, but it could be simple stuff like having your file in A4-format and your printer only having papers of type "Letter" or something equally silly. In cases like these, Word is forced to reformat. If you need or rely on a 100% accurate re-representation of your content, Word should not be your tool. Never. Use PDFs. Simple as that. If you are writing a normal texts however, it will probably never be a real problem which you will even notice. Now, my question to the author (should he check out HN): How on earth is this related to OOXML? Where is the smoking gun saying this is a bug in the file-format? I honestly don't see it, and I don't see anyone else here questioning this unbacked claim. I honestly expected better from HN.

zzleeper 16y ago
Check the article again. It's not about layout preserved when printing, it's about actual spaces being deleted in the editor and then kept deleted when you save the file.
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  Maybe I need to spell it for you and those downvoting the OP. The headline says 'Open XML' (implying a bug in the standard format) whereas the article is talking about Office 2007 and Office 2010. See the difference?
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    It's the implementation of the standard in Office 2007 and 2010
    - recoiledsnake 16y ago
      So a more appropriate title could be 'Microsoft's Office embarassment' ? Or not?

tzs 16y ago

This sounds like simply a bug in Word 2007 or Word 2010, not a problem with the document format.