8 ms·

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

245 points by firexcy 1y ago

khelavastr 1y ago
Does this person not understand XML serializers..?
- dathinab 1y ago
  they probably do, parsing the XML syntax was never the complexity issue with OOXML, or XML formats in general everything on top of the XML AST is the issue
- yftsui 1y ago
  Exactly, there is no data provided on why the author believes it is “too complex”, just one random person ranting.
  - ranger_danger 1y ago
    You're not wrong, but it's funny that this same topic was posted just earlier today with a very different sentiment in the comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 But if you dig hard enough, there's actually links to more evidence of why it is that complicated... so I don't think it was necessarily intentionally done as a method of lock-in, but where's the outrage in that? /s "Complicated file format has legitimate reasons for being complicated" just doesn't have the same ring to it as a sensationalized accusation with no proof.
    - mjevans 1y ago
      Weren't those reasons effectively...? 'special case everything we ever used to do in office so everything renders exactly the same' Instead of offering some suitable placebo for properly rendering into a new format ONCE with those specific quirks fixed in place?
      - lozenge 1y ago
        What would that look like? "You have opened your Word 97 document in Office 2003. The quirks have been removed, so it might look different now. Check every page before saving as docx." "You have pasted from a Word 97 document into an Office 2003 OOXML document. Some things will not work."
        ranger_danger 1y ago
        If you want a look at how this (doesn't) work in practice, just look at Libreoffice. I once made 3 hours worth of comments on a Word doc, and as soon as I saved it, they all vanished into thin air. And for the pedantic, yes it warns you when saving as a .docx that "not all features are supported", but it does that every time, for every document, so nobody pays attention to it or has any idea what it even means. To me the way it handles this is just completely unacceptable.
        mjevans 1y ago
        Office could freely continue to support their old proprietary formats if they wanted. In an ideal world a converter would generate E.G. a 1200 PPI render of each page, then compare it to a similar render as provided in the nearest rendition in the allowed simple new format. Those could be diffed to produce a highlight of areas that changed. The software could then ask if the transcription from one format to the other was close enough, or if there were some corner case that wasn't good enough. Bonus points, collect feedback if the end user is willing to submit examples.
    - dathinab 1y ago
      you can have both having a lot of intend to keep it complicated and cause vendor locking and comply in bad faith and this being very easy to archive just by not trying to improve on a status quo and creating a standard where you are the only one to decide what goes in where. Or other simple things like intentionally putting a senior engineer you know tends to painfully overweening things but keep it in a working state, etc. etc. Just by management decisions done in a higher level then the project you can pretty reliable mess up things in various ways as needed pretty reliable as long as you have enough people to choose from.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  I have no idea what you mean to express by this. I've never met an XML or SOAP truther, but are you really saying that because XML can be serialized, it's impossible for an XML schema to be artificially complex? What is it about serializing XML that would optimize the expression of a data model?
- constantcrying 1y ago
  Do you not understand that there is a difference between parsing something and implementing a specification? These are totally separate things. Obviously parsing the XML is trivial. What is not trivial is what you do with parsed XML and what the parsed structure represents.
wvenable 1y ago
> Unfortunately, while an XML schema can be simple, it can also be unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features. One could now use that exact sentence to describe the most popular open document format of all: HTML and CSS.
- masa331 1y ago
  Can you be more specific here? HTML and CSS can't be described like that in my opinion. It is complex but not complicated. You can start with just a few small parts and get to a usable and clean document within hours from the first contact with the languages. The tags and rules are usually quite self-describing while consice and there are tons and tons of good docs and tools. The development of the standards is also open and you can peek there if you want to understand decisions and rationals.
  - alterom 1y ago
    It's not about making a document. It's about making software that would display a document in that format correctly. I.e., a browser.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    The current HTML spec alone is a 1000+ page PDF, and I can't imagine the CSS spec being much shorter. Wordsmithing your way around this doesn't make them any easier.
    - masa331 1y ago
      Sure the spec might be enormous but you don't need to touch it at all to be productive quickly. In no HTML or CSS tutorial i'v ever seen was a reference to the spec nor did i need to go there to solve something. And that in itself is another proof how nicely it is designed actually. Because on the other hand there are other document types or schemas where you absolutely have to go to the spec because it's is so cryptic and badly designed and not self-explaining that there is nothing else you can do.
ddtaylor 1y ago
Again?
cranberryturkey 1y ago
The post is essentially reminding people that XML doesn’t magically equal openness. A schema can be “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement”, and in the case of Office 365 the spec runs to “over 8 000 pages” and uses deeply nested tags, overloaded elements and wildcards. The result is that only the vendor can feasibly implement it, which eliminates third‑party implementations and lets the vendor dictate terms. The rail‑control analogy in the article makes the point well. What isn’t acknowledged is that a lot of that complexity isn’t purely malicious. OOXML had to capture decades of WordPerfect/Office binary formats, include every oddball feature ever shipped, and satisfy both backwards‑compatibility and ISO standardisation. A comprehensive schema will inevitably have “dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements” and long type hierarchies. That’s one reason why the spec is huge. Likewise, there’s a difference between a complicated but documented standard and a closed format—OOXML is published (you can go and download those 8 000 pages), and the parts of it that matter for basic interoperability are quite small compared with the full kitchen‑sink spec. That doesn’t mean the criticism is wrong. The sheer size and complexity of OOXML mean that few free‑software developers can afford to implement more than a tiny subset. When the bar is that high, the practical effect is the same as lock‑in. For simple document exchange, OpenDocument is significantly leaner and easier to work with, and interoperability bodies like the EU have been encouraging governments to use it for years. The takeaway for anyone designing document formats today should be the same as the article’s closing line: complexity imprisons people; simplicity and clarity set them free.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >that few free‑software developers can afford to. Considering how little most free software makes they can't afford to do a lot of things. It's not a hard bar to hit.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  The complaint that OOXML was overly complex was a criticism when Microsoft first introduced the format, but as you point out, it needed to be able to handle decades of old formatting rules back then already. While I'm sure that there are stuff in the format that Microsoft made needlessly complex, one has to remember that they still need to be able to maintain the code, so throwing in to many roadblocks for open source developers would likely come back to haunt them. Still we know they did just that with SMB, so why not with OOXML. What surprises me is how well LibreOffice handles various file formats, not just OOXML. In some cases LibreOffice has the absolute best support for abandoned file formats. I'm not the one maintaining them, so it's easy enough for me to say "See, you managed just fine". It much be especially frustrating when you have the OpenDocument format, which does effectively the same thing, only simpler.
jiggawatts 1y ago
The opinion in the article misses something fundamental. The complexity is not artificial, it is completely organic and natural. It is incidental complexity born of decades of history, backwards compatibility, lip-service to openness, and regulatory compliance checkbox ticking. It wasn't purposefully added, it just happened. Every large document-based application's file format is like this, no exceptions. As a random example, Adobe Photoshop PSD files are famously horrific to parse, let alone interpret in any useful way. There are many, many other examples, I don't aim to single out any particular vendor. All of this boils down to the simple fact that these file formats have no independent existence apart from their editor programs. They're simply serialised application state, little better than memory-dumps. They encode every single feature the application has, directly. They must! Otherwise the feature states couldn't be saved. It's tautological. If it's in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or any other Office app somewhere, it has to go into the files too. There are layers and layers of this history and complex internal state that has to be represented in the file. Everything from compatibility flags, OLE embedding, macros, external data source, incremental saves, the support for quirks of legacy printers that no longer exist, CYMK, external data, document signing, document review notes, and on and on. No extra complexity had to be added to the OOXML file formats, that's just a reflection of the complexity of Microsoft Office applications. Simplicity was never engineered into these file formats. If it had been, it would have been a tremendous extra effort for zero gain to Microsoft. Don't blame Microsoft for this either, because other vendors did the exact same thing, for the exact same pragmatic reasons.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  You might start with something simple with aim for simplicity. Then you need to add more features. Eventually in enough years you will have lost the simplicity as you have that many features to support. You might not add features, but well that is most likely losing proposition against those competitors that have features. As generally normal users want some tiny subset of features. Be it images, tables, internal links, comments, versions.
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    Everyone uses 10% of the features of complex software... it's just not the same 10%, which is why the other 90% needs to be in there and included in the file formats. It's also not sufficient to find that "perfect" lean and mean application that happens to cover precisely the 10% that you need for yourself, because now you can't interchange content with other people that need different features! I regularly open and edit Office documents created by others that utilise features I had never even heard of. I didn't know until very recently that Power Point has extensive animation support, or that Excel embeds Python, or that both it and Power BI can reach out to OData API endspoints to refresh data tables or even ingest Parquet directly. You might not need that, but the guy that prepared the report for you needed it.
bob1029 1y ago
This is a comical perspective to me. I've been ass-deep in core banking APIs where we generate service references from WSDL/XSDs. Some of the resulting codegen measures in the tens of megabytes for some files. I wouldn't even attempt to quantify the number of pages of documentation. And this is just for mid size US banking domain. Microsoft Office has to work literally everywhere for everything. The fact that it's only 8000 pages of documentation is likely a miracle. If you're working with an XML schema that is served up in XSD format, using code gen is the best (only) path. I understand it's old and confusing to the new generation, but if you just do it the boomer way you can have the whole job done in like 15 minutes. Hand-coding to an XML interface would be like cutting a board with an unplugged circular saw.
- piker 1y ago
  While I generally agree, I don't think the author is complaining about the XML spec's complexity per se but rather that rendering the underlying structures to a page is hard.
- jajko 1y ago
  Yeah another b(w)anker dev here, complex xsds seem to be the baseline in industry as soon as the role of that spec escapes simple 1 server : 1 client use case. One example I work with sometimes is almost 1MB of xsds and thats a rather small internal data tool. They even have restful json variant but its not that used, and complexity is roughly the same (you escape namescape hell, escaping xml chars etc but then tooling around json is a bit less evolved). Xml to object mapping tool is a must.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Interfacing sounds like only just half the battle though? Like, I don't understand why this is a counter-argument.
  - bob1029 1y ago
    As argued elsewhere in this thread there is essential complexity inherent to any problem that cannot be eliminated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44613270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44613270 If you have this much complexity and there is nothing you can do to reduce it, then the next best thing is to have an incredibly convenient way to stand up a perfect client on the other side of the fence within a single business day.
pessimizer 1y ago
Strange that this is getting traction again, and good on the people getting it out there. Saw something about "OOXML" make Google News the other day. Having a debate about the quality of OOXML feels like a waste of time, though. This was all debated in public when Microsoft was making its proprietary products into national standards, and nobody on Microsoft's side debated the formats on the merits because there obviously weren't any, except a dubious backwards compatibility promise that was already being broken because MS Office couldn't even render OOXML properly. People trying to open old MS Office documents were advised to try Openoffice. They instead did the wise thing and just named themselves after their enemy ("Open Office? Well we have Office Open!"), offered massive discounts and giveaways to budget-strapped European countries for support, and directly suborned individual politicians. Which means to me that it's potentially a winnable battle at some point in the future, but I don't know why now would be a better outcome than then. Maybe if you could trick MS into fighting with Google about it. Or just maybe, this latest media push is some submarine attempt by Google to start a new fight about file formats?
another_twist 1y ago
How hard would it be to generate a parser for this spec with AI code gen ?
- constantcrying 1y ago
  If a spec is "difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features" it is ridiculous to assume an AI could do an adequate job.
- choeger 1y ago
  A parser is trivial. It's XML and you have a schema. What you want is a compiler (e.g., into a different document format) or an interpreter (e.g., for running a search or a spell checker). That's a task that's massively complicated because you cannot give an LLM the semantic definition of the XML and your target (both typically are under documented and under specified). Without that information, the LLM would almost certainly generate an incomplete or broken implementation.
danjc 1y ago
So, basically the same as Adobe with PDF
piker 1y ago
This is a dupe from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 but I'll repeat what I said over there. I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life. Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA. It's not "artificial", it's just complex. MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't. The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast. [1] Plug: https://tritium.legal https://tritium.legal
- unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
  LO is at least as functional as some other market leading SaaS word processors. LO could spin their product into a cloud application and not at all be "toast", because people in separate walled gardens no longer expect interoperability. As for complexity, an illustration-- while using M365 I recently was confounded by a stretch of text that had background highlighting that was neither highlight markup, not paragraph or style formatting. An AI turned me onto an obscure dialog for background shading at a text level which explained the mystery. I've been a sophisticated user of M365 for decades and never encountered such a thing, nor have a clear idea of why anyone would use text-level background formatting in preference of the more obvious choices. Yet, there it is. With that kind of complexity and obscurity in the actual product, it's inevitable the file format would be convoluted and complex.
  - piker 1y ago
    Agreed, but the point the author is missing is that complexity doesn't exist due to deliberate corporate lock in, but because the product is 40 years old and has had 10-11 ways to do just about everything it does. Unfortunately, as your case illustrates, there are still documents in the wild that depend on these legacy features. So to render with 100% fidelity, you end up in a sprawling web of complexity. Microsoft can afford to navigate that web (and already owns it). It's neigh impossible for an open-source product to do so.
fithisux 1y ago
I have seen in the past the same claim for Bluetooth. I think this needs to end and it is up to ordinary people to seek alternatives. Apart from LibreOffice, we still have many other alternatives.
jpalomaki 1y ago
What we should really do is abandon the WYSIWYG approach to document editing. This inevitably leads into vendor lock in. Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content. Formats like markdown are nice, because they force you to do this. The old way made sense 30 yers ago when information was consumed on paper.
- piker 1y ago
  Not sure why you're getting so downvoted. It's a totally reasonable opinion in 2025 but it faces massive adoption headwind. People still cling to the idea of printing pages of documents even if it's increasingly rare (even, say in legal) for them to do so.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    This is getting downvoted because it's ludicrous. Users want WYSIWIG - documents that are what appears on the printer page or when people they share the document to open it. "Interoperability" is something technical enthusiasts talk about and not something that users creating documents care about outside of the people they share with seeing exactly what was created.
    - nlitened 1y ago
      as you say, tech enthusiasts only _talk_ about interoperability, but very very few actually care about it. Try interoperating between two pieces of code written in two different languages without spinning up an HTTP server or a separate virtual machine with a database system. Not even two different languages, just between two major versions of the same damn programming language.
    - piker 1y ago
      I think you're missing the point that the "G" in WYSIWIG is "when printed". Everybody wants uniform rendering across applications in the way that, say, websites render uniformly across browsers. But fewer people care today what it looks like when printed--they're never going to print it anyway. They're just going to docusign it and call it a day. In other words, fidelity to the printed page isn't really as important or as magical today as it was in 1984.
jongjong 1y ago
Microsoft is using an artificially complex everything as a lock-in tool. I learned this many years ago when I learned how to create a window in C++ and it took around 100 lines of over-engineered code just to create an empty window on Windows. Even TypeScript encourages artificial complexity of interfaces and creates lock-in, that's why Microsoft loves it. That's why they made it Turing Complete and why they don't want TypeScript to be made backwards with JavaScript via the type annotations ECMAScript proposal. They want complex interfaces and they want all these complex interfaces to be locked into their tsc compiler which they control. They love it when junior devs use obscure 'cutting edge' or 'enterprise grade' features of their APIs and disregard the benefits of simplicity and backwards compatibility.
flohofwoe 1y ago
I don't even think it's intentional, they had to come up with a file format which supports all the weird historical artefacts in the various Office tools. They didn't have the luxury to first come up with a clean file format and then write the tools around it. And I bet they didn't switch to XML because it was superior to their old file formats, but simply because of the unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
- Arainach 1y ago
  An XML format, even one with a lot of cruft to handle legacy complexity, is absolutely easier to parse/interop with than a legacy binary format that was to a large degree a serialization of undocumented in-memory content. OOXML was, if anything, an attempt to get ahead of requirements to have a documented interoperable format. I believe it was a consequence of legal settlements with the US or EU but am too tired at the moment to look up sources proving that.
  - dathinab 1y ago
    > is absolutely easier to parse/interop with than a legacy binary 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)
- Neil44 1y ago
  This format of XML in a zip with a docx extension came into existence in Office 2007
- mickeyp 1y ago
  Sorry but XML is a good fit for this. Most people who've never used XML cannot ever fathom that it does actually do a number of things well. Being able to layer markup with text before, inside elements, and after is especially important --- as anyone with HTML knowledge should know. Being able to namespace things so, you know, that OLE widget you pulled into your documents continue to work? Even more important. And that third-party compiled plugin your company uses for some obscure thing? Guess what. Its metadata gets correctly embedded and saved also, and in a way that is forward and backwards compatible with tooling that does not have said plugin installed. So no, it wasn't 'hype'.
scarface_74 1y ago
There have been third party support for importing and exporting Office documents as long as I can remember. It was part of Apple’s File Exchange extension in 1994. No one is locked into Office because of file formats.
- lcnielsen 1y ago
  > No one is locked into Offive because of file formats A lot of people are locked in because those import/export features are typically imperfect (or perhaps the documents themselves are) and will badly and often "invisibly" (to the non-Office user) break something.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    You could say the same about a web page or even Markdown… But honestly these days, the only time I use Word is to keep my resume up to date once per quarter. That’s a really simple document.
catmanjan 1y ago
Does software that produces files have an obligation to provide interoperability?
- happymellon 1y ago
  When they have a monopoly, places like the EU will frown on purposefully breaking compatibility. Its called antitrust.
  - graemep 1y ago
    > When they have a monopoly, places like the EU will frown on purposefully breaking compatibility. What exactly have they done about it?
    - piker 1y ago
      Without knowing too much of the EU history, I have always understood that anti-trust pressure from the EU effectively forced Microsoft to publish the OOXML spec in the first place.
  - ranger_danger 1y ago
    > Purposefully According to who? With what proof? And how/why do they get to be the arbiters of that?
    - happymellon 1y ago
      > According to who? With what proof? They normally get asked to investigate by other interested parties, and then ask other independent experts in the field. > And how/why do they get to be the arbiters of that? By being the government? Microsoft doesn't have to sell their software in Europe if they don't like the rules.
- dathinab 1y ago
  no, only if you have a quasi monopoly on Office Application in pretty much every single (western) government through all departments and sectors.
jonathaneunice 1y ago
I wish this article had shown side-by-side examples. Back when I built document transformation tools as part of a publishing pipeline, the simplicity and clarity benefit of OpenDocument's XML over Microsoft's OOXML were *staggering* in practice. A beautiful, clean, logical approach vs beyond-Byzantine cruft and complexity at every turn. I don't remember every element enough to render from memory, but ChatGPT's example feels about right: OpenDocument <text:p text:style-name="Para"> This is some <text:span text:style-name="Bold">bold text</text:span> in a paragraph. </text:p> OOXML <w:p> <w:pPr> <w:pStyle w:val="Para"/> </w:pPr> <w:r> <w:t>This is some </w:t> </w:r> <w:r> <w:rPr> <w:b/> </w:rPr> <w:t>bold text</w:t> </w:r> <w:r> <w:t> in a paragraph.</w:t> </w:r> </w:p> OpenDocument is not always 100% "simple," but it's logical and direct. Comprehensible on sight. OOXML is...something else entirely. Keep in mind the above are the simplest possible examples, not including named styles, footnotes, comments, change markup, and 247 other features commonly seen in commercial documents. The OpenDocument advantage increases at scale. In every way except breadth of adoption.
- _the_inflator 1y ago
  By accident, I saw firsthand how a simple layout, such as a page and a few paragraphs, can make you question why formats like Markdown are even possible, because the number one text processing tool would throw such a gigantuan load of crude syntax at you for a few paragraphs. Respect to MS for keeping the lights on. People need to understand that there is no MS format per se, but different standards from which you can choose. Years ago, when OpenDocument was fairly popular, MS was kind of hesitant to use an XML format. XML is a strict format, no matter the syntax. And I bet that MS intended such a complicated format to prevent Open Source Projects from developing parsers and MS from losing market share this way. I bet there are considerations about such a strategy discussed at the time, buried in Archive.org. On the other hand, MS didn't want nor see the XML chaos, which would follow later on. XML is a format, and all it demands is being formally correct. It is like Assembler, fixed instruction sets with lots of freedom, and only the computer needs to "understand" the code - if it runs, ship it. ZEN of whatever cannot be enforced. JavaScript was once the Web's assembly language. Everything was possible, but you had to do the gruntwork and encapsulate every higher-level function in a module that consisted of hundreds of LoCs. Do in hundreds of LoCs, what a simple instruction in Python could achieve with one. Babel came, TypeScript, and today I lost track of all the changes and features of the language and its dialects. The same goes for PHP, Java, C++, and even Python. So many features that were hyped, and you must learn this crap nevertheless, because it is valid code. Humans cannot stand a steady state. The more you add to something, the more active and valuable it seems. I hate feature creep — kudos to all the compiler devs, who deserve credit for keeping the lights on.
skywhopper 1y ago
While the critique is correct, the complexity is probably not “artificial”. Rather, it directly reflects the internal decades-old complex architecture of Office applications rather than making any attempt to be an actually useful schema for sharing between applications. It only exists because Microsoft was desperate to avoid antitrust consequences for the dominance of Office 25 years ago.
drewcoo 1y ago
As opposed to the original binary format, designed to copy directly to the heap on restore?
markus_zhang 1y ago
I think the lock-in is more about MSFT's contracts with schools, governments and corporations. I wish they break large corporations to pieces.
kaleidawave 1y ago
HTML?
- sim7c00 1y ago
  well essentially considering desktop office apps are web browsers basically :')
donatj 1y ago
Mind you, Microsoft already had an earlier very capable XML spreadsheet format that was much easier to parse, SpreadsheetML. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpreadsheetML
- praseodym 1y ago
  They had a few more variants in the same era, such as WordProcessingML for Word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats
mcswell 1y ago
I guess this is not directly related, but I worked on a modified DocBook XML schema for some years. We were writing grammars of natural languages, so we had no use for some of the DocBook constructs, and needed to add others. That wasn't hard. And there are WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editors, like XMLmind, which read the schema and helped you create conforming documents. There are at least two ways to get from such an XML document to a PDF; we used pdfLaTeX, modified to handle our extra constructs, and then XeLaTeX. I won't say it was a simple toolpath, but it allowed us to do at least two things that would have been difficult with Word or OpenOffice: (1) It gave us an archival XML format, which will probably be readable and understandable for centuries. For grammars of endangered languages, that's important, because the languages won't be around more than a couple decades. (2) It gave us the ability to cleanly typeset documents that had multiple scripts (including both Roman and various right-to-left scripts, like Arabic and Thaana).
djohnston 1y ago
I spent some time reverse engineering bits of WordML for presentation to LLMs. Not a fun time. Things like ordered list formatting ends up having a lot of unspecified behaviour and precedence, and the same doc in gdocs and word will end up rendering differently because they decided on their own precedences.
jasonm23 1y ago
In other news, water is wet.

245 points by firexcy 1y ago

khelavastr 1y ago

Does this person not understand XML serializers..?

dathinab 1y ago
they probably do, parsing the XML syntax was never the complexity issue with OOXML, or XML formats in general everything on top of the XML AST is the issue
yftsui 1y ago
Exactly, there is no data provided on why the author believes it is “too complex”, just one random person ranting.
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  You're not wrong, but it's funny that this same topic was posted just earlier today with a very different sentiment in the comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 But if you dig hard enough, there's actually links to more evidence of why it is that complicated... so I don't think it was necessarily intentionally done as a method of lock-in, but where's the outrage in that? /s "Complicated file format has legitimate reasons for being complicated" just doesn't have the same ring to it as a sensationalized accusation with no proof.
  - mjevans 1y ago
    Weren't those reasons effectively...? 'special case everything we ever used to do in office so everything renders exactly the same' Instead of offering some suitable placebo for properly rendering into a new format ONCE with those specific quirks fixed in place?
    - lozenge 1y ago
      What would that look like? "You have opened your Word 97 document in Office 2003. The quirks have been removed, so it might look different now. Check every page before saving as docx." "You have pasted from a Word 97 document into an Office 2003 OOXML document. Some things will not work."
      - ranger_danger 1y ago
        If you want a look at how this (doesn't) work in practice, just look at Libreoffice. I once made 3 hours worth of comments on a Word doc, and as soon as I saved it, they all vanished into thin air. And for the pedantic, yes it warns you when saving as a .docx that "not all features are supported", but it does that every time, for every document, so nobody pays attention to it or has any idea what it even means. To me the way it handles this is just completely unacceptable.
      - mjevans 1y ago
        Office could freely continue to support their old proprietary formats if they wanted. In an ideal world a converter would generate E.G. a 1200 PPI render of each page, then compare it to a similar render as provided in the nearest rendition in the allowed simple new format. Those could be diffed to produce a highlight of areas that changed. The software could then ask if the transcription from one format to the other was close enough, or if there were some corner case that wasn't good enough. Bonus points, collect feedback if the end user is willing to submit examples.
  - dathinab 1y ago
    you can have both having a lot of intend to keep it complicated and cause vendor locking and comply in bad faith and this being very easy to archive just by not trying to improve on a status quo and creating a standard where you are the only one to decide what goes in where. Or other simple things like intentionally putting a senior engineer you know tends to painfully overweening things but keep it in a working state, etc. etc. Just by management decisions done in a higher level then the project you can pretty reliable mess up things in various ways as needed pretty reliable as long as you have enough people to choose from.
pessimizer 1y ago
I have no idea what you mean to express by this. I've never met an XML or SOAP truther, but are you really saying that because XML can be serialized, it's impossible for an XML schema to be artificially complex? What is it about serializing XML that would optimize the expression of a data model?
constantcrying 1y ago
Do you not understand that there is a difference between parsing something and implementing a specification? These are totally separate things. Obviously parsing the XML is trivial. What is not trivial is what you do with parsed XML and what the parsed structure represents.

wvenable 1y ago

> Unfortunately, while an XML schema can be simple, it can also be unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features. One could now use that exact sentence to describe the most popular open document format of all: HTML and CSS.

masa331 1y ago
Can you be more specific here? HTML and CSS can't be described like that in my opinion. It is complex but not complicated. You can start with just a few small parts and get to a usable and clean document within hours from the first contact with the languages. The tags and rules are usually quite self-describing while consice and there are tons and tons of good docs and tools. The development of the standards is also open and you can peek there if you want to understand decisions and rationals.
- alterom 1y ago
  It's not about making a document. It's about making software that would display a document in that format correctly. I.e., a browser.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  The current HTML spec alone is a 1000+ page PDF, and I can't imagine the CSS spec being much shorter. Wordsmithing your way around this doesn't make them any easier.
  - masa331 1y ago
    Sure the spec might be enormous but you don't need to touch it at all to be productive quickly. In no HTML or CSS tutorial i'v ever seen was a reference to the spec nor did i need to go there to solve something. And that in itself is another proof how nicely it is designed actually. Because on the other hand there are other document types or schemas where you absolutely have to go to the spec because it's is so cryptic and badly designed and not self-explaining that there is nothing else you can do.

ddtaylor 1y ago

Again?

cranberryturkey 1y ago

The post is essentially reminding people that XML doesn’t magically equal openness. A schema can be “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement”, and in the case of Office 365 the spec runs to “over 8 000 pages” and uses deeply nested tags, overloaded elements and wildcards. The result is that only the vendor can feasibly implement it, which eliminates third‑party implementations and lets the vendor dictate terms. The rail‑control analogy in the article makes the point well. What isn’t acknowledged is that a lot of that complexity isn’t purely malicious. OOXML had to capture decades of WordPerfect/Office binary formats, include every oddball feature ever shipped, and satisfy both backwards‑compatibility and ISO standardisation. A comprehensive schema will inevitably have “dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements” and long type hierarchies. That’s one reason why the spec is huge. Likewise, there’s a difference between a complicated but documented standard and a closed format—OOXML is published (you can go and download those 8 000 pages), and the parts of it that matter for basic interoperability are quite small compared with the full kitchen‑sink spec. That doesn’t mean the criticism is wrong. The sheer size and complexity of OOXML mean that few free‑software developers can afford to implement more than a tiny subset. When the bar is that high, the practical effect is the same as lock‑in. For simple document exchange, OpenDocument is significantly leaner and easier to work with, and interoperability bodies like the EU have been encouraging governments to use it for years. The takeaway for anyone designing document formats today should be the same as the article’s closing line: complexity imprisons people; simplicity and clarity set them free.

charcircuit 1y ago
>that few free‑software developers can afford to. Considering how little most free software makes they can't afford to do a lot of things. It's not a hard bar to hit.
mrweasel 1y ago
The complaint that OOXML was overly complex was a criticism when Microsoft first introduced the format, but as you point out, it needed to be able to handle decades of old formatting rules back then already. While I'm sure that there are stuff in the format that Microsoft made needlessly complex, one has to remember that they still need to be able to maintain the code, so throwing in to many roadblocks for open source developers would likely come back to haunt them. Still we know they did just that with SMB, so why not with OOXML. What surprises me is how well LibreOffice handles various file formats, not just OOXML. In some cases LibreOffice has the absolute best support for abandoned file formats. I'm not the one maintaining them, so it's easy enough for me to say "See, you managed just fine". It much be especially frustrating when you have the OpenDocument format, which does effectively the same thing, only simpler.

jiggawatts 1y ago

The opinion in the article misses something fundamental. The complexity is not artificial, it is completely organic and natural. It is incidental complexity born of decades of history, backwards compatibility, lip-service to openness, and regulatory compliance checkbox ticking. It wasn't purposefully added, it just happened. Every large document-based application's file format is like this, no exceptions. As a random example, Adobe Photoshop PSD files are famously horrific to parse, let alone interpret in any useful way. There are many, many other examples, I don't aim to single out any particular vendor. All of this boils down to the simple fact that these file formats have no independent existence apart from their editor programs. They're simply serialised application state, little better than memory-dumps. They encode every single feature the application has, directly. They must! Otherwise the feature states couldn't be saved. It's tautological. If it's in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or any other Office app somewhere, it has to go into the files too. There are layers and layers of this history and complex internal state that has to be represented in the file. Everything from compatibility flags, OLE embedding, macros, external data source, incremental saves, the support for quirks of legacy printers that no longer exist, CYMK, external data, document signing, document review notes, and on and on. No extra complexity had to be added to the OOXML file formats, that's just a reflection of the complexity of Microsoft Office applications. Simplicity was never engineered into these file formats. If it had been, it would have been a tremendous extra effort for zero gain to Microsoft. Don't blame Microsoft for this either, because other vendors did the exact same thing, for the exact same pragmatic reasons.

Ekaros 1y ago
You might start with something simple with aim for simplicity. Then you need to add more features. Eventually in enough years you will have lost the simplicity as you have that many features to support. You might not add features, but well that is most likely losing proposition against those competitors that have features. As generally normal users want some tiny subset of features. Be it images, tables, internal links, comments, versions.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  Everyone uses 10% of the features of complex software... it's just not the same 10%, which is why the other 90% needs to be in there and included in the file formats. It's also not sufficient to find that "perfect" lean and mean application that happens to cover precisely the 10% that you need for yourself, because now you can't interchange content with other people that need different features! I regularly open and edit Office documents created by others that utilise features I had never even heard of. I didn't know until very recently that Power Point has extensive animation support, or that Excel embeds Python, or that both it and Power BI can reach out to OData API endspoints to refresh data tables or even ingest Parquet directly. You might not need that, but the guy that prepared the report for you needed it.

bob1029 1y ago

This is a comical perspective to me. I've been ass-deep in core banking APIs where we generate service references from WSDL/XSDs. Some of the resulting codegen measures in the tens of megabytes for some files. I wouldn't even attempt to quantify the number of pages of documentation. And this is just for mid size US banking domain. Microsoft Office has to work literally everywhere for everything. The fact that it's only 8000 pages of documentation is likely a miracle. If you're working with an XML schema that is served up in XSD format, using code gen is the best (only) path. I understand it's old and confusing to the new generation, but if you just do it the boomer way you can have the whole job done in like 15 minutes. Hand-coding to an XML interface would be like cutting a board with an unplugged circular saw.

piker 1y ago
While I generally agree, I don't think the author is complaining about the XML spec's complexity per se but rather that rendering the underlying structures to a page is hard.
jajko 1y ago
Yeah another b(w)anker dev here, complex xsds seem to be the baseline in industry as soon as the role of that spec escapes simple 1 server : 1 client use case. One example I work with sometimes is almost 1MB of xsds and thats a rather small internal data tool. They even have restful json variant but its not that used, and complexity is roughly the same (you escape namescape hell, escaping xml chars etc but then tooling around json is a bit less evolved). Xml to object mapping tool is a must.
perching_aix 1y ago
Interfacing sounds like only just half the battle though? Like, I don't understand why this is a counter-argument.
- bob1029 1y ago
  As argued elsewhere in this thread there is essential complexity inherent to any problem that cannot be eliminated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44613270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44613270 If you have this much complexity and there is nothing you can do to reduce it, then the next best thing is to have an incredibly convenient way to stand up a perfect client on the other side of the fence within a single business day.

pessimizer 1y ago

Strange that this is getting traction again, and good on the people getting it out there. Saw something about "OOXML" make Google News the other day. Having a debate about the quality of OOXML feels like a waste of time, though. This was all debated in public when Microsoft was making its proprietary products into national standards, and nobody on Microsoft's side debated the formats on the merits because there obviously weren't any, except a dubious backwards compatibility promise that was already being broken because MS Office couldn't even render OOXML properly. People trying to open old MS Office documents were advised to try Openoffice. They instead did the wise thing and just named themselves after their enemy ("Open Office? Well we have Office Open!"), offered massive discounts and giveaways to budget-strapped European countries for support, and directly suborned individual politicians. Which means to me that it's potentially a winnable battle at some point in the future, but I don't know why now would be a better outcome than then. Maybe if you could trick MS into fighting with Google about it. Or just maybe, this latest media push is some submarine attempt by Google to start a new fight about file formats?

another_twist 1y ago

How hard would it be to generate a parser for this spec with AI code gen ?

constantcrying 1y ago
If a spec is "difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features" it is ridiculous to assume an AI could do an adequate job.
choeger 1y ago
A parser is trivial. It's XML and you have a schema. What you want is a compiler (e.g., into a different document format) or an interpreter (e.g., for running a search or a spell checker). That's a task that's massively complicated because you cannot give an LLM the semantic definition of the XML and your target (both typically are under documented and under specified). Without that information, the LLM would almost certainly generate an incomplete or broken implementation.

danjc 1y ago

So, basically the same as Adobe with PDF

piker 1y ago

This is a dupe from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606646 but I'll repeat what I said over there. I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life. Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA. It's not "artificial", it's just complex. MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't. The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast. [1] Plug: https://tritium.legal https://tritium.legal

unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
LO is at least as functional as some other market leading SaaS word processors. LO could spin their product into a cloud application and not at all be "toast", because people in separate walled gardens no longer expect interoperability. As for complexity, an illustration-- while using M365 I recently was confounded by a stretch of text that had background highlighting that was neither highlight markup, not paragraph or style formatting. An AI turned me onto an obscure dialog for background shading at a text level which explained the mystery. I've been a sophisticated user of M365 for decades and never encountered such a thing, nor have a clear idea of why anyone would use text-level background formatting in preference of the more obvious choices. Yet, there it is. With that kind of complexity and obscurity in the actual product, it's inevitable the file format would be convoluted and complex.
- piker 1y ago
  Agreed, but the point the author is missing is that complexity doesn't exist due to deliberate corporate lock in, but because the product is 40 years old and has had 10-11 ways to do just about everything it does. Unfortunately, as your case illustrates, there are still documents in the wild that depend on these legacy features. So to render with 100% fidelity, you end up in a sprawling web of complexity. Microsoft can afford to navigate that web (and already owns it). It's neigh impossible for an open-source product to do so.

fithisux 1y ago

I have seen in the past the same claim for Bluetooth. I think this needs to end and it is up to ordinary people to seek alternatives. Apart from LibreOffice, we still have many other alternatives.

jpalomaki 1y ago

What we should really do is abandon the WYSIWYG approach to document editing. This inevitably leads into vendor lock in. Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content. Formats like markdown are nice, because they force you to do this. The old way made sense 30 yers ago when information was consumed on paper.

piker 1y ago
Not sure why you're getting so downvoted. It's a totally reasonable opinion in 2025 but it faces massive adoption headwind. People still cling to the idea of printing pages of documents even if it's increasingly rare (even, say in legal) for them to do so.
- Arainach 1y ago
  This is getting downvoted because it's ludicrous. Users want WYSIWIG - documents that are what appears on the printer page or when people they share the document to open it. "Interoperability" is something technical enthusiasts talk about and not something that users creating documents care about outside of the people they share with seeing exactly what was created.
  - nlitened 1y ago
    as you say, tech enthusiasts only _talk_ about interoperability, but very very few actually care about it. Try interoperating between two pieces of code written in two different languages without spinning up an HTTP server or a separate virtual machine with a database system. Not even two different languages, just between two major versions of the same damn programming language.
  - piker 1y ago
    I think you're missing the point that the "G" in WYSIWIG is "when printed". Everybody wants uniform rendering across applications in the way that, say, websites render uniformly across browsers. But fewer people care today what it looks like when printed--they're never going to print it anyway. They're just going to docusign it and call it a day. In other words, fidelity to the printed page isn't really as important or as magical today as it was in 1984.

jongjong 1y ago

Microsoft is using an artificially complex everything as a lock-in tool. I learned this many years ago when I learned how to create a window in C++ and it took around 100 lines of over-engineered code just to create an empty window on Windows. Even TypeScript encourages artificial complexity of interfaces and creates lock-in, that's why Microsoft loves it. That's why they made it Turing Complete and why they don't want TypeScript to be made backwards with JavaScript via the type annotations ECMAScript proposal. They want complex interfaces and they want all these complex interfaces to be locked into their tsc compiler which they control. They love it when junior devs use obscure 'cutting edge' or 'enterprise grade' features of their APIs and disregard the benefits of simplicity and backwards compatibility.

flohofwoe 1y ago

I don't even think it's intentional, they had to come up with a file format which supports all the weird historical artefacts in the various Office tools. They didn't have the luxury to first come up with a clean file format and then write the tools around it. And I bet they didn't switch to XML because it was superior to their old file formats, but simply because of the unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Arainach 1y ago
An XML format, even one with a lot of cruft to handle legacy complexity, is absolutely easier to parse/interop with than a legacy binary format that was to a large degree a serialization of undocumented in-memory content. OOXML was, if anything, an attempt to get ahead of requirements to have a documented interoperable format. I believe it was a consequence of legal settlements with the US or EU but am too tired at the moment to look up sources proving that.
- dathinab 1y ago
  > is absolutely easier to parse/interop with than a legacy binary 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)
Neil44 1y ago
This format of XML in a zip with a docx extension came into existence in Office 2007
mickeyp 1y ago
Sorry but XML is a good fit for this. Most people who've never used XML cannot ever fathom that it does actually do a number of things well. Being able to layer markup with text before, inside elements, and after is especially important --- as anyone with HTML knowledge should know. Being able to namespace things so, you know, that OLE widget you pulled into your documents continue to work? Even more important. And that third-party compiled plugin your company uses for some obscure thing? Guess what. Its metadata gets correctly embedded and saved also, and in a way that is forward and backwards compatible with tooling that does not have said plugin installed. So no, it wasn't 'hype'.

scarface_74 1y ago

There have been third party support for importing and exporting Office documents as long as I can remember. It was part of Apple’s File Exchange extension in 1994. No one is locked into Office because of file formats.

lcnielsen 1y ago
> No one is locked into Offive because of file formats A lot of people are locked in because those import/export features are typically imperfect (or perhaps the documents themselves are) and will badly and often "invisibly" (to the non-Office user) break something.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  You could say the same about a web page or even Markdown… But honestly these days, the only time I use Word is to keep my resume up to date once per quarter. That’s a really simple document.

catmanjan 1y ago

Does software that produces files have an obligation to provide interoperability?

happymellon 1y ago
When they have a monopoly, places like the EU will frown on purposefully breaking compatibility. Its called antitrust.
- graemep 1y ago
  > When they have a monopoly, places like the EU will frown on purposefully breaking compatibility. What exactly have they done about it?
  - piker 1y ago
    Without knowing too much of the EU history, I have always understood that anti-trust pressure from the EU effectively forced Microsoft to publish the OOXML spec in the first place.
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  > Purposefully According to who? With what proof? And how/why do they get to be the arbiters of that?
  - happymellon 1y ago
    > According to who? With what proof? They normally get asked to investigate by other interested parties, and then ask other independent experts in the field. > And how/why do they get to be the arbiters of that? By being the government? Microsoft doesn't have to sell their software in Europe if they don't like the rules.
dathinab 1y ago
no, only if you have a quasi monopoly on Office Application in pretty much every single (western) government through all departments and sectors.

jonathaneunice 1y ago

I wish this article had shown side-by-side examples. Back when I built document transformation tools as part of a publishing pipeline, the simplicity and clarity benefit of OpenDocument's XML over Microsoft's OOXML were *staggering* in practice. A beautiful, clean, logical approach vs beyond-Byzantine cruft and complexity at every turn. I don't remember every element enough to render from memory, but ChatGPT's example feels about right: OpenDocument <text:p text:style-name="Para"> This is some <text:span text:style-name="Bold">bold text</text:span> in a paragraph. </text:p> OOXML <w:p> <w:pPr> <w:pStyle w:val="Para"/> </w:pPr> <w:r> <w:t>This is some </w:t> </w:r> <w:r> <w:rPr> <w:b/> </w:rPr> <w:t>bold text</w:t> </w:r> <w:r> <w:t> in a paragraph.</w:t> </w:r> </w:p> OpenDocument is not always 100% "simple," but it's logical and direct. Comprehensible on sight. OOXML is...something else entirely. Keep in mind the above are the simplest possible examples, not including named styles, footnotes, comments, change markup, and 247 other features commonly seen in commercial documents. The OpenDocument advantage increases at scale. In every way except breadth of adoption.

_the_inflator 1y ago
By accident, I saw firsthand how a simple layout, such as a page and a few paragraphs, can make you question why formats like Markdown are even possible, because the number one text processing tool would throw such a gigantuan load of crude syntax at you for a few paragraphs. Respect to MS for keeping the lights on. People need to understand that there is no MS format per se, but different standards from which you can choose. Years ago, when OpenDocument was fairly popular, MS was kind of hesitant to use an XML format. XML is a strict format, no matter the syntax. And I bet that MS intended such a complicated format to prevent Open Source Projects from developing parsers and MS from losing market share this way. I bet there are considerations about such a strategy discussed at the time, buried in Archive.org. On the other hand, MS didn't want nor see the XML chaos, which would follow later on. XML is a format, and all it demands is being formally correct. It is like Assembler, fixed instruction sets with lots of freedom, and only the computer needs to "understand" the code - if it runs, ship it. ZEN of whatever cannot be enforced. JavaScript was once the Web's assembly language. Everything was possible, but you had to do the gruntwork and encapsulate every higher-level function in a module that consisted of hundreds of LoCs. Do in hundreds of LoCs, what a simple instruction in Python could achieve with one. Babel came, TypeScript, and today I lost track of all the changes and features of the language and its dialects. The same goes for PHP, Java, C++, and even Python. So many features that were hyped, and you must learn this crap nevertheless, because it is valid code. Humans cannot stand a steady state. The more you add to something, the more active and valuable it seems. I hate feature creep — kudos to all the compiler devs, who deserve credit for keeping the lights on.

skywhopper 1y ago

While the critique is correct, the complexity is probably not “artificial”. Rather, it directly reflects the internal decades-old complex architecture of Office applications rather than making any attempt to be an actually useful schema for sharing between applications. It only exists because Microsoft was desperate to avoid antitrust consequences for the dominance of Office 25 years ago.

drewcoo 1y ago

As opposed to the original binary format, designed to copy directly to the heap on restore?

markus_zhang 1y ago

I think the lock-in is more about MSFT's contracts with schools, governments and corporations. I wish they break large corporations to pieces.

kaleidawave 1y ago

HTML?

sim7c00 1y ago
well essentially considering desktop office apps are web browsers basically :')

donatj 1y ago

Mind you, Microsoft already had an earlier very capable XML spreadsheet format that was much easier to parse, SpreadsheetML. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpreadsheetML

praseodym 1y ago
They had a few more variants in the same era, such as WordProcessingML for Word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats

mcswell 1y ago

I guess this is not directly related, but I worked on a modified DocBook XML schema for some years. We were writing grammars of natural languages, so we had no use for some of the DocBook constructs, and needed to add others. That wasn't hard. And there are WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editors, like XMLmind, which read the schema and helped you create conforming documents. There are at least two ways to get from such an XML document to a PDF; we used pdfLaTeX, modified to handle our extra constructs, and then XeLaTeX. I won't say it was a simple toolpath, but it allowed us to do at least two things that would have been difficult with Word or OpenOffice: (1) It gave us an archival XML format, which will probably be readable and understandable for centuries. For grammars of endangered languages, that's important, because the languages won't be around more than a couple decades. (2) It gave us the ability to cleanly typeset documents that had multiple scripts (including both Roman and various right-to-left scripts, like Arabic and Thaana).

djohnston 1y ago

I spent some time reverse engineering bits of WordML for presentation to LLMs. Not a fun time. Things like ordered list formatting ends up having a lot of unspecified behaviour and precedence, and the same doc in gdocs and word will end up rendering differently because they decided on their own precedences.

jasonm23 1y ago

In other news, water is wet.