[donatj]

I wrote a rarely used Numbers importer for my company in I'd guess around 2009. The XML format they used was truly atrocious. Save a single value in a single cell, and it resulted in 1 megabyte of XML, compressed of course. Still, parsing that megabyte took a decent chunk of ram for the XML parser I used.

I spent a couple hours maybe 6 months ago trying to reverse engineer the protobuf version. I could not. Above my ability.

This is frankly kind of fascinating to read and sounds like it targets exactly me.

I wish they'd just gone with a better XML format, or JSON or something. Locking a users raw data away in a binary file even if it's a protobuf will never not be rude.