50
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
50 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
32474 readers
204 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Docx is not a proprietary format, it's a standard, it's called Office Open XML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
And M$ published its specifications, so Libreoffice devs could support it. But here comes the funny part: M$ (deliberately?) doesn't follow the specification it published. So the formatting problems of LibreOffice come from M$, because they don't follow their specs, but M$ can just do whatever they want because of its market share.
I read this story a long time ago, and I'm paraphrasing, but on this wiki page you can read a lot of controversies related to this format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
It's a "standard" only in the sense that Microsoft took the MS Office binary file formats (which are basically just writing the internal state of Word/Powerpoint/whatever to disc), serialized it to XML, half-assed some bullshit documentation for it, and bribed the standards body to rubber-stamp it. It's still, at it's core, basically defined by whatever nonsense Microsoft's implementation does.
Aren't the specifications also insanely long and complicated for good measure?
Yeah, wiki says it's 6000 pages. But that's not that long compared to other similar file standards, and it also contains pptx and xlsx.
For comparison PDF standard is about 1000 pages, HTML (without CSS, just pure HTML) is 1500 pages.
Not only are they insanely long, MS strategically doesn't follow its own specs in places so other software using the specs "fuck up formatting" even if they follow MS's specs perfectly.
M$ is the best abbreviation for Microsoft yet