Source: OSNews
Article note: The long-held suspicion gets ever more concrete.
There's a tenuous argument that it's a compatibility thing, but ... the degrees of complexity and shitty documentation don't really align with that.
The Document Foundation, which developers LibreOffice, is mad at Microsoft for the levels of complexity in the Microsoft 365 document format. They claim Microsoft intentionally makes this format’s XML schema as complex and obtuse as possible to lock users into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.
This artificial complexity is characterised by a deeply nested tag structure with excessive abstraction, dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements, non-intuitive naming conventions, the widespread use of extension points and wildcards, the multiple import of namespaces and type hierarchies, and sparse or cryptic documentation.
In the case of the Microsoft 365 document format, the only characteristic not present is sparse or cryptic documentation, given that we are talking about a set of documents totalling over 8,000 pages. All the other characteristics are present to a greater or lesser extent, making life almost impossible for a developer trying to implement the schema.
↫ Italo Vignoli
I feel like this was widely known already, since I distinctly remember the discussions around the standardisation process for the Office Open XML file formats. Then, too, it was claimed that Microsoft’s then-new XML file formats were far more complex and obtuse than the existing, already standardised OpenDocument file formats, and that there was no need to push Microsoft’s new file formats through the process.
These days, you might wonder how relevant all of this still is, but considering vast swaths of the private, corporate, government, and academic world still run on Microsoft Office and its default file formats, it’s definitely still a hugely relevant matter. As an office suite, you are basically required to support Office Open XML, and if Microsoft is making that more complex and obtuse on purpose, that’s a form of monopoly abuse that should be addressed.
