This week, I got asked how I feel about the German state mandating ODF (Open Document Format) in its "Deutschland Stack" framework, and not Microsoft's OOXML (Office Open XML).
I'm the author of a popular Go library for reading and writing one of the OOXML formats (XLSX), thus the assumption was I'd be in supported of that format.
Let me be clear:
- 1. I'd rather we didn't use "office" documents. Its a bad paradigm.
- 2. If we must, then ODF would be my choice every time. OOXML sucks.
I don’t know about today, but back in 2010’s when Poland was legislating these standards for e-government I had a detailed look at ODF & OOXML specifications. Ironically OOXML specification was much more complete, had more exampled, details etc. Both were ISO standards and freely licensed, but on the specification level OOXML seemed more mature.
@kravietz that it was more mature at that time, was likely because it was largely just dumping the binary structure that existed already as an XMl file, and Microsoft has essentially infinite resources to spend on getting though the ISO process.
What I’ve learned with 16 years, hands on, is that Microsoft is actually not transparently compatible with its own standard. You can do things that are completely legitimate in that standard and Excel will reject the files as corrupt.
Thank you, won’t argue with that as the only OOXML and ODF I’ve programmatically generated were rather basic spreadsheets.
@kravietz It’s not to imply that OOXML is a bad standard per se, but its entire existence was about protecting Microsoft’s position and everything that surrounds that would be bad for Europe even if the format were a thing of unparalleled technical wonder.
Ultimately I still maintain, office formats conflate data, presentation and processing in ways that are unhelpful. They are tied to particular way of thinking about computing that’s suboptimal at best.
Patrick Cernko
The ol' tealeg 🐡
kravietz 🦇