1w ago

LibreOffice calls out Microsoft for using "complex" file formats to lock in Office users

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Lee Duna @lemmy.nz

1w ago

LibreOffice calls out Microsoft for using "complex" file formats to lock in Office users

www.neowin.net /news/libreoffice-calls-out-microsoft-for-using-complex-file-formats-to-lock-in-office-users/

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1w ago

LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats

www.neowin.net /news/libreoffice-calls-out-microsoft-for-using-complex-file-formats-to-lock-in-office-users/

9 comments

I just find this article comes at a weird time, OOXML having been around for like, what, 20 years? I know ODF have been criticizing it from the Start, just wondering what exactly prompts this current iteration
Jokes on them. Everyone can open to pdf now. It's only a matter of time before Europe's MS marketshare is obliterated, and everyone else that is not a moron will follow.
OOXML is essentially an XML-ified dump of MS Office internal data structures, that Microsoft then minimally documented and bribed ECMA to "certify" as a "standard." It's absolute horseshit that nobody should buy into.
I give folks pdf and if they insist on word then I give them the liber office saved as word. If they say the format is not coming right for them I say it must be their side as its fine for me and to try opening it in google.
- Word claims to support standards. Send them the .odt.
  
  Is this the best option to keep the documents the same on any program? Documents and spreadsheet just gets messy when moving programs.
I know a lot of work has been done in these regards. But I want an era of simple documents, content over complicated styles.
Lot's of good markdown-isk ways to make documents. And anything complicated can be made that just reads those files and formats the way people want (for reports, journal papers and such). People will definitely try to have their styles, but separating them from content would save so much time.
- Markdown is great for static documents, but quickly becomes a nightmare for merges or dynamic content.
  Still, Microsoft’s Office Open XML is the opposite, convoluted, hard for both man and machine to parse, overly verbose for simple cases and downright arcane for complex ones.
  If only there was some middle ground, Some kind of open document standard….
OOXML spec is annoying in the sense of deeply nested structures and an opaque naming scheme, but the documentation itself is public and not that hard to parse (aside from being split into multiple documents and being thousands of pages long).
As a reference guide for adding new features to an existing product it's usable, but wanting to hit 100% feature parity by starting at the beginning would be pretty much impossible.

9 comments