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Comment by endtime | Hacker News Reader

I worked on the Word Viewer web app for MS last summer (my team also owned the Word Editor) and complete preservation of rich client formatting was considered a core feature. Trying to cast it as Microsoft "[touting] its proprietary document formats" is kind of...silly. Preserving formatting is a feature, and a useful one at that.

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That is not the point the Google spokesperson was trying to make.

The full quote: "It says a lot about Microsoft's approach to customer lock-in that the company touts its proprietary document formats, which only Microsoft software can render with true fidelity, as the reason to avoid using other products".

So they were complaining about MS making it hard to decode the Word format and making it tough to preserve format when importing.

.docx isn't hard to decode. ;) Though it is hard to render across browsers.

OOXML is no easier to decode than the old memory-dump and COM-based DOC formats which were comprehensively documented first by third parties and then Microsoft. It's just like how SWF was trivial to decode long before it was 'opened'. Container formats are fucking easy.

What's always been insanely difficult is duplicating the API that the content interfaces with, bug for bug.

As someone who writes an Open Source OpenXML decoder I find it way easier than COM. The OpenXML specification docs are comprehensive, when there's a problem - usually detected by OpenOffice's parser as Word is very forgiving - the specs have a specific answer.

There's good development tools including a Firebox style Xpath app for Word too.

The main issue is MS Office 2007 and 2010 generating the legacy OpenXML formats by default, which include a world of possible features including quite a few from Lotus 123. There's too many edge cases to handle, and this isn't the right format for docs made this year.

'decode' was probably the wrong word to use there — how about 'consume'?

If interoperability is important why did Microsoft not get behind OpenDocument? I know this sounds a little passive-aggressive but I'm genuinely interested to know if there was a reason other than NIH.

the reasons, at least from Microsofts POV, are pretty well detailed and mostly involved backward compatibility and fidelity concerns.

For example, and I forget the exact numbers, at the time the OOXML spec had in the region of 300 pages of documentation around functions and formulae in spreadsheets, and the ODF spec had 6.

Fleshing out the ODF spec to the point it would be suitable is a headache that I imagine MS didn't want.

If preserving formatting is such a useful feature why does Word mess up the formatting when you plug in a different printer?

Ask Leo: Why does my Word Document display differently on different computers?:

http://ask-leo.com/why_does_my_microsoft_word_document_displ...

I'd feel a lot happier sending someone a PDF from Google docs than assuming that a Word document will make it unscathed, even if created and viewed in the exact same version of Word.

Seriously? You're asking me to defend some barely relevant quirk of functionality from Office XP, which came out nine years ago, and Office 2003, which came out seven years ago?

I can tell you what was considered important on the Word web app, which is brand new and is what I worked on. I have no insight into the design process on older versions.

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