[nxc18]

A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because:

- MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays.

At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly dominant with surprisingly little concern for long-term document accessibility. For example, Google Drive will only sync down links to Google doc files on desktop. Aside from manually exporting every single document you have in the preferred format, there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes, and good luck switching to another service/software. It would be nice to see a little interest in standards/compatibility for google docs now that so many businesses use it.

[tremon]

with open source libraries/ reference implementations

Citation needed? FAFAIK the reference implementation is closed source, and there are no libraries -- only a powershell module that is actually a wrapper around the Word/Excel OLE objects.

[nxc18]

https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK

[19870213]

There is Apache POI for the JVM.

https://poi.apache.org/overview.html

[selckin]

Uh no, barely works for even the most basic tasks

[bilch]

> there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes

https://myaccount.google.com/privacy#takeout

[slim]

Microsoft can can change that format anytime and break your opensource tools

[novaleaf]

the point isn't about .docx, it's about .odf, the point of which is that any given vendor can't go change it whenever they want.

[christophilus]

I agree with this. Even if MS formats were all proprietary, proprietary formats can generally be hacked/decoded/understood. Closed remote storage services on the other hand, can hold your data hostage, and there's not much you can do about it.

[noobiemcfoob]

I've come to accept that any data not stored as plain text is subject to these format issues.

The reality is we know it's not always terribly important. If you really want to preserve something, you'd use a format like markdown or LaTeX at the outside. Most things are weren't the effort, and I just want it to look pretty.