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.

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.

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.

Microsoft being an illegal monopoly for the *checks notes* twenty-fourth official year.

Just out-and-out assholes for the fiftieth straight year.

I mean since the company literally pioneered these type of techniques. Unfortunately I don't see this being fixed anytime soon

MS has been playing this game since the early 90's

This isn't new, WordPerfect was killed by this among other illegal MS moves.

It's been like that since the files got X on the end; docx, xlsx, pbix. They are just zip files containing XML and stuff. This is how you can turn off any password protection of a file, change to zip, disable protection in the XML, change the extension back.

I remember working with a library called HSSF to read excel files some years ago. It’s an acronym meaning Horrible SpreadSheet Format.

I echo the devs sentiment.

It’s more egregious to me that if you properly implement the Office Open XML [sic] formats, it won’t work with MS Office, because they don’t follow their own specs.

Microsoft Office 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021 and Microsoft 365 continue to read and write files that are conformant to ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional by default. Microsoft Office 2013 and later fully support ISO/IEC 29500 Strict,[73]but do not use it as the default file format because of backwards compatibility concerns.[74]

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_supports_Office_Open_XML

EU: "The Americans sent another goddamn .docx file."

embassy gets sent a notice that closed source formats are not accepted

Microsoft: REEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

And now Microsoft is supported in every thread by an army of stan bots.

What is this, 2007?

This is the innovation that capitalism breeds. The one they have been telling us all this time, remember?

All headlines that yse the word “slams” are just clickbait.

Edit: Not saying LibreOffice isn’t correct, but, honestly journalism needs to get its act together.

They always have been