3 ms·

I remember MS being roundly criticised for OOXML when it landed, because it had fairly major parts that were defined by reference to the behaviour in the MS imp

I remember MS being roundly criticised for OOXML when it landed, because it had fairly major parts that were defined by reference to the behaviour in the MS implementation. Literally "the correct behaviour according to the specification is whatever Microsoft Word does". I can have a certain amount of sympathy for MS doing that, because if your proprietary file format includes things like "take a dump of whatever the app happens to have in memory in some magical region or other", it's an uphill battle to get anything rigorous out of it in the first place. It doesn't satisfy one of the main goals of an open standard, though: that anyone should be able to offer a complete alternative implementation, purely by reference to the standard. So no, not like that.

Someone 6y ago
I think there wasn’t a way for Microsoft to do this in a way that satisfied all critics. Their XML-based format existed for a few years before it was made into an open standard, so the alternative would be a standard that didn’t describe the format of the zillions of documents ‘out there’. Also, chances are nobody at Microsoft itself did know the exact effect of many of the more obscure flags. So, you either get a clean start, or you get a standard that ‘all’ existing documents can be converted to without change/loss of formatting (‘all’ in quotes because there likely are truly old documents starting life, say, as WordPerfect documents converted into “WP compatible MS Word .doc”, edited a bit, converted to “MS Word .docx”, edited a bit more, converted into open office XML whose layout changed over time) If you want the former, use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument.
- 6c696e7578 6y ago
  I remember WP being a very stable format between versions, unlike Word ~ 2000, it wasn't able to manage their own document formats. So if people put up with the issues then, why not now?

Someone 6y ago

I think there wasn’t a way for Microsoft to do this in a way that satisfied all critics. Their XML-based format existed for a few years before it was made into an open standard, so the alternative would be a standard that didn’t describe the format of the zillions of documents ‘out there’. Also, chances are nobody at Microsoft itself did know the exact effect of many of the more obscure flags. So, you either get a clean start, or you get a standard that ‘all’ existing documents can be converted to without change/loss of formatting (‘all’ in quotes because there likely are truly old documents starting life, say, as WordPerfect documents converted into “WP compatible MS Word .doc”, edited a bit, converted to “MS Word .docx”, edited a bit more, converted into open office XML whose layout changed over time) If you want the former, use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument.

6c696e7578 6y ago
I remember WP being a very stable format between versions, unlike Word ~ 2000, it wasn't able to manage their own document formats. So if people put up with the issues then, why not now?