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I completely agree with the premise of this article, but this line baffles me: ... Word's document format will always be complicated, even if it is natively XML
by daeken 17y ago
I completely agree with the premise of this article, but this line baffles me: ... Word's document format will always be complicated, even if it is natively XML and completely open, simply because it has to support all the thousands of features that Word itself provides.
This is akin to saying that binary has to be complicated because of all the numbers it can represent. Most features don't require a file format change in any way, even when storing, say, undo histories for new features. Word documents really aren't that complicated, unless they're made to be.
- DougBTX 17y agoThe other way of phrasing that line is: to garentee that you can display any Word document, you need to be able to support any formatting that Word supports. Parsing a Word document is much simpler than displaying a Word document, often people mean the latter when they say "open a Word document".
- socratees 17y agoYou must do some research on how complex OOXML is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML .Initially there was a huge opposition in making OOXML a open standard, but eventually Microsoft succeeded in pushing the standard. Ever wondered why a empty word document's size is ~34 KB?
- daeken 17y agoI'm not arguing that it isn't complex, I'm arguing that the feature-set of Word has nothing to do with the complexity of the file format by necessity. His assertion that the feature-set of Word is what makes it complex is simply foolish.
- jballanc 17y agoIt's true that any arbitrary file format's complexity doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the feature set of the authoring tool (e.g. LaTeX), but in this case much of the extraneous complexity of OOXML is tied to Word's feature set. In particular, the need for backward compatibility with features from previous versions of Word make this format more complex than it needs to be, given the current feature set.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jefffoster 17y agoThere's a Joel on Software article that discusses this. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html Historically Office file formats have grown from in-memory structures serialized to disk which helps in part to explain the complexity of them.