3 ms·

> Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats They did, Microsoft made Office support some open XML thing, and what changed?

marcosdumay 2y ago
It's not really open, nor is it really the MS Office documents format. And yet, a few competing alternatives appeared anyway.
chucke1992 2y ago
People realized that actually it requires a lot of investment to produce an office suite.
megous 2y ago
What changed? It's now trivial to write exporters for Office formats for specific use case. Save a sample of what you want to have exported, and then just template the XML, generate it based on source data and zip it. Most of the time you don't even need to read the specification. Compare that with the times of eg. closed binary XLS format.
pyeri 2y ago
We did get Libre office and Apache OpenOffice due to that? I think they both should become obsolete in an ideal world where folks converse in fluent markdown to achieve everything they want in a document.
- trelane 2y ago
  No, LibreOffice (and Apache OpenOffice, but Apache OpenOffice is pretty much dead and nobody should use it) are descended from Sun's OpenOffice.org, which is descended from their acquisition of StarOffice. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument Microsoft's "open" standard, "Office Open XML" was created in response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML The standardization process was incredibly irregular (see Wikipedia and LWN from that time period.) I'm sure the naming was not intended to sow confusion at all.
andreimackenzie 2y ago
I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced myriad SDKs in various languages, and the ones I have experience with worked quite well. The format becoming less arcane and better documented was important to enable this.

marcosdumay 2y ago

It's not really open, nor is it really the MS Office documents format. And yet, a few competing alternatives appeared anyway.

chucke1992 2y ago

People realized that actually it requires a lot of investment to produce an office suite.

megous 2y ago

What changed? It's now trivial to write exporters for Office formats for specific use case. Save a sample of what you want to have exported, and then just template the XML, generate it based on source data and zip it. Most of the time you don't even need to read the specification. Compare that with the times of eg. closed binary XLS format.

pyeri 2y ago

We did get Libre office and Apache OpenOffice due to that? I think they both should become obsolete in an ideal world where folks converse in fluent markdown to achieve everything they want in a document.

trelane 2y ago
No, LibreOffice (and Apache OpenOffice, but Apache OpenOffice is pretty much dead and nobody should use it) are descended from Sun's OpenOffice.org, which is descended from their acquisition of StarOffice. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument Microsoft's "open" standard, "Office Open XML" was created in response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML The standardization process was incredibly irregular (see Wikipedia and LWN from that time period.) I'm sure the naming was not intended to sow confusion at all.

andreimackenzie 2y ago

I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced myriad SDKs in various languages, and the ones I have experience with worked quite well. The format becoming less arcane and better documented was important to enable this.