Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

The Office Open XML file format is extremely complex, and takes up around 6,500 pages (compared to ~1000 for ODF). One thing you notice when reading the DOCX spec is that they designed it with the sole constraint that DOC files could easily be converted to DOCX. For example, you'll frequently see compatibility tags like "autoSpaceLikeWord95", "footnoteLayoutLikeWW8", "useWord2002TableStyleRules", and "lineWrapLikeWord6" that expose internal implementation details. Rather than creating a useful standard allowing all users to store their documents in a clean, portable way, Microsoft decided to make their standard faithfully reproduce all of the quirks and bugs of their legacy binary formats. It's so difficult to correctly implement the Office Open XML standard that even Microsoft took until Office 2013 to do so (the standard was approved in 2006).

View on HN

So true. "It's XML, so it must easy to parse and manipulate" is such a naive, even misleading attitude. If what you do is take a byzantine, legacy-encrusted implementation and just serialise its data strucures to an XML representation, very little has been gained.

[edit: but I will grant that almost anything is better than attempting to parse useful content from PDF.]

I had a CTO who told me that "anytime someone says something will be simple because it uses XML, just repeat what they said and use the word text instead of XML. Then tell me if it sounds smart."

*Uses regular expressions to parse binary XML*

In fairness though this a really good point.

Microsoft "adopted" XML purely to assuage various regulators that their new format was totally gonna be open, interoperable and standardized. It is a pure fig leaf but judging by all the comments in here mentioning "XML", it seems to have worked.

I think they pretty much had to do that to preserve the formatting of existing documents for users who are force-upgraded by their employers to new Office versions. But it seems a scraper that just wants the information in the document can ignore almost all of those tags.

edit: ninja'd.

> "autoSpaceLikeWord95", "footnoteLayoutLikeWW8", "useWord2002TableStyleRules", and "lineWrapLikeWord6"

I expect that whatever tooling the USPTO uses can probably just ignore those things. They're extracting metadata, not actually rendering it.

Interesting! How do they compare feature-wise? I feel like there must be things each of them support that the other one doesn't, but I don't know how consequential they are.

I don't know how thorough or accurate it is, but Microsoft has a list.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/differences-betwe...

The list was only a few lines the last time I looked years ago, so maybe they're actually trying to make a complete list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com