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Comment by rhdunn | Hacker News Reader

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There are places where it says the equivalent of "Works the same as Word 95" [3], but does not specify in the specification what that means.

It's essentially a serialization of the binary format to XML.

ODF 1.4 is around 1,100 pages across all 4 parts whereas OOXML is over 6,000.

[1] https://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/08/microsofts-f...

[2] https://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/2007/08/micros...

[3] https://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-p...

They improved this in later revisions of the standard. The behaviour of autoSpaceLikeWord95 is now actually described and there's an example.

You can see it for yourself here (in Part 4): https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...

> There are places where it says the equivalent of "Works the same as Word 95" [3], but does not specify in the specification what that means.

Yeah, sure, whatever. You'll never see these kinds of documents in real life. And the specified quirks were minor. If you don't implement them, you'll get subtle formatting issues in documents imported directly from Word97.

MS could have just put them into a "vendor-specific" extension and not documented them at all.

> ODF 1.4 is around 1,100 pages across all 4 parts whereas OOXML is over 6,000.

LOL, no. SVG spec alone is 800 pages. ODF formula spec is 200 pages alone, and is still underspecified.

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