[nelgaard]

But those are completely different uses of a storage format.

Library of congress considers if someone a 100 years from now could write a new importer in whatever langauge/AI they might use by then.

Office documents are something you send in email attachments to people you often barely know, and expect them to read it in whatever office system they have. And if the recipient uses e.g., Microsoft Word, OFD/Sqlite might not work.

[justin66]

It is true that it requires effort for the developers of a software program to support a given file format. Beyond that I'm not sure what your point is.

[galangalalgol]

Not the op, but one point would be, why did we even pick xml, when we had latex and html? Why is a relational database the right tool for a document format?

[cxr]

They're constrained by different requirements. The comment was clear enough:

"those are completely different uses"

It's not a hard concept to grasp. There is no riddle to decipher.

[toast0]

> Office documents are something you send in email attachments to people you often barely know, and expect them to read it in whatever office system they have.

Eh, if they're not running the same office system, down to patches, you can't really expect much.