[Joker_vD]

sigh Just because it was not deliberately engineered to be prohitibively expensive to support does not mean that it can not be used to deliberately obstruct interoperability. It's really not that difficult a concept: if you want others to suffer, you can take a sad artifact of well-meant historical accidents, and say "welp, now it's a standard, you gotta support it!" There is nothing contradictory or conspirational.

[taeric]

Agreed. I'm... not entirely clear I get the distinction the article is trying to make?

If you take the idea that it is "artificially complex, because they actively added complexity", then I can see how that isn't quite right. But "artificially complex" can also allow for "because they actively avoided the effort to remove complexity." In which case, we are back to the same spot? But in agreement this time?

[piker]

I think we take issue with requiring the leap to Microsoft “deliberately” obstructing interoperability. Microsoft just isn’t incentivized to make it simple to implement, but it’s probably less complicated than the various web standards.

[Joker_vD]

An engineering team in Microsoft decides to switch from binary format to XML to save effort in the long run; even though it'll take some effort now, they have the competency, and can afford it. They are absolutely correct!

But then their manager needs to sell this project to the higher-ups, who have read BillG's memo about how "One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depend on proprietary IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows." and took it to heart. So what does he do? Why, he spins a tale that since it's XML, they'll be able to standardize it, and everyone else will still be forced to interoperate with MS Office anyhow, because it will be the de-facto reference implementation (by the virtue of being there first, and widely deployed), and the spec is going to be an absolute PITA to implement decently — and that manager too will be absolutely correct!

[piker]

It’s not actually that bad.

[to11mtm]

IME there at least used to be a difference between 'fresh OO doc' and 'oo doc upsaved from legacy' as far as parsing.

I know when I had to deal with a LOT of excel in 2008-2013, somewhere in that range I gave up on trying to parse the XML (admittedly with the then-rudimentary tools, to say nothing of nascent state of nuget at the time) and just learned how to do VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) as we all had excel installed anyway, and it led to less overall code for the tasks we had to do that involved Excel...