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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

> The two office suites take very different paths here. LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open standard meant to be controlled by no single company. Microsoft, on the other hand, created its own Office Open XML (OOXML) to support every feature in its own software, giving us the familiar .docx and .xlsx

It's so impressively underhandedly sneaky that Microsoft named their ODF-competitor format “Office Open” just as OpenOffice.org's (LibreOffice's direct ancestor) hype peaked with OO.o 2.0 having ODF as its native format, when MS Office finally had a viable and popular competitor for like the first time ever.

https://www.openoffice.org/press/2.0/press_release.html (2005-10-20)

https://news.microsoft.com/2005/11/21/qa-microsoft-co-sponso... (2005-11-21)

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I highly doubt anyone except extremely technically literate individuals even heard of "Office Open XML" or "OOXML". To the average person, .docx is just the newer .doc

and ooxml is basically just a serialization of microsoft office internals, with attributes such as "likeword95" on certain elements..

microsoft made a total piece of steaming turd, and its users dont care.

I think you are mixing up some things. There are no "likeword95" attributes.

At one point during standardization there was a proposal to add several attributes with names like that although most of them referred to non-Microsoft products like WordPerfect, but it didn't make it into the final standard. That's what you are probably thinking of.

Their purpose was to allow someone writing say a WordPerfect to OOXML converter to mark in the OOXML places that were using some specific WordPerfect formatting that couldn't be replicated in OOXML.

OOXML word processors were supposed to preserve those markings if they encountered them but never add them.

There was/is a <autoSpaceLikeWord95>

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/documentformat....

Huh. Looks like some of them came back. Here’s one of the WordPerfect ones.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/documentformat....

I wonder if there is a complete list readily available?

Yes, it's bad, but the users _do_ care. Most don't have a choice, business machines have MS Office/Outlook/Teams as default and they can't change.

they dont care enough. I have said no to work that would require me to work with loads of MS shit, I have said no to open photoshop files, various other proprietary crap files.

They might care, but they just only care a tiny tiny tiny tiny bit, and certainly not enough to inconvenience themselves in any way for it.

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