Discussion
~all real world MS Office docs are OOXML Transitional, which lets MS put the fun stuff in an ever mutating vendor extension. so they do.
to my knowledge, nobody anywhere has ever used OOXML Strict for real work. does anyone know real world examples of OOMXL Strict in the wild?
@davidgerard Yeah, probably also the reason the Danish experiment of ditching Office failed, proprietary extensions to the ECMA rubber-stamped “standard”
@toriver MS does document all the extensions, in a way that's almots useful nearly but actually you need MSO to test it against
@davidgerard We once had a customer bug on a product at work due to some custom OOXML parsing code not understanding strict files, but I can't recall if these were 'real' production files or just someone throwing test files at it.
@numpsyuk LO reads Strict, no actual real-world customer wanted to fund writing it
MSO's Strict support (read/write) is inconsistent and not even in all versions.
@davidgerard getting OOXML adopted as a second standard is one of the more egregious corporate stitch-ups of a standards organisation imho.
If it wasn't for the EU forcing them, Microsoft Office wouldn't support ODF and it would be a standard in name only.
@trechnex big time, i was watching it happen at the time
@davidgerard I'm out of the loop but back in the day came across some B2B business applications producing strict spreadsheet files (it was easier). Not sure on current state of play but for 'Office' applications Transitional is the only game in town realistically
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
@davidgerard Mind you, I think putting a LLM to work on code for OOXML might fall afoul of Anthropic's prohibition on torturing them