this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Lots of problems that used to exist in this area no longer do.
Used to be that the de facto standard office format was doc/xls/ppt, now both MS Office and LibreOffice support both ODF and OOXML both of which are open standards.
Used to be that internal software was mostly written for the Windows API, now it is mostly written for web browsers (between which there are no longer any significant differences in terms of standards compatibility).
The world really is slowly getting better. I would like to help accelerate this, but don't really have any ideas where to start.
There are standards and then there are "standards." ODF was designed to be usable and implementable from the spec. Meanwhile, OOXML is just a glorified XML serialization of Word's internal memory structures that Microsoft bribed ECMA to rubber-stamp.
Of course they are not equally good, no question about it. They are still both (technically) open standards and the main point is that they are both supported by both pieces of software, i.e. the practical difference between them is mainly in the UI, you don't need to get the other one just to read files created by one of them.