So it’s an “open standard”, not in the sense that anybody can contribute to the development, but in the sense that the details of the standard are open and you can learn about them.
The format itself is an XML version of the existing Office document formats, and they grew organically over decades with random bugs, features, and bug compatibilities with other programs. e.g. There will be a random flag on an object that makes no sense but is necessary for interoperating with some Lotus 1-2-3 files that a company had, who then worked with Microsoft to support back it in the 90s. Things you can’t change, nobody really cares about, but get written down because the software already implements it (and will emit sometimes)
So does LibreOffice, but they’ve been called out multiple times for purposefully making the format overly complex to make it as hard as possible to reliable read and write to it.
Wasn’t .docx also supposed to be an open standard but M$ kept fucking with the implementation so it would only work in Office?
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
So it’s an “open standard”, not in the sense that anybody can contribute to the development, but in the sense that the details of the standard are open and you can learn about them.
The format itself is an XML version of the existing Office document formats, and they grew organically over decades with random bugs, features, and bug compatibilities with other programs. e.g. There will be a random flag on an object that makes no sense but is necessary for interoperating with some Lotus 1-2-3 files that a company had, who then worked with Microsoft to support back it in the 90s. Things you can’t change, nobody really cares about, but get written down because the software already implements it (and will emit sometimes)
Isn’t it open? It works with Dropbox and macOS Numbers opens .docx and saves as .docx.
So does LibreOffice, but they’ve been called out multiple times for purposefully making the format overly complex to make it as hard as possible to reliable read and write to it.
I genuinely think they’re just incompetent lol
You should see the windows xp source code
The rapidly dwindling sanity of windows programmers as expressed through code comments