Rustaceans at the border
Rustaceans at the border
Posted Apr 29, 2022 14:09 UTC (Fri) by ssokolow (guest, #94568)In reply to: Rustaceans at the border by flussence
Parent article: Rustaceans at the border
The problem with the OOXML specification isn't over-documentation. It's rampant NIH combined with "Good time to clear out code debt? What's that?"
For example, the XLS to XLSX migration would have been a great time to ditch Excel 1.0's date format which assumes 1900 was a leap year. Instead, they baked it into XLSX.
Combine that with how OOXML embeds a million other things that ODF farms out to other specs (eg. SVG for vectors) and it's easy to see why OOXML is such a mess. They pushed a million implementation details of a legacy codebase into the spec document and then politicked it into being a "standard" to make it difficult for others to implement. (As I remember, they fronted the membership fees to get a bunch of their allies added to the voting body just in time for the vote.)
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