[Info-vax] WEENDOZE question

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/7/2018 6:48 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 2/7/2018 11:46 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>>    <VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote:
>>>>> Was your job to write out an Excel Spreadsheet or a
>>>>> Numbers|LibreOffice|Gnumeric|Shheets Spreadsheet?
>>>>> You originally said "an Excel Spreadsheet".  The
>>>>> customer is a Windows customer so we can assume they
>>>>> wanted an Excel Spreadsheet.  If the spreadsheet
>>>>> you created doesn't work with Excel how is it that
>>>>> Excel got it wrong?
>>>>
>>>> http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c071691_ISO_IEC_29500-1_2016.zip#en
>>>>
>>>> Download it and read it.  Then, unzip an Excel .XLSX and look at its contents.
>>>
>>> The problem is that the .XLSX format is very very touchy.  It looks like
>>> an XML file inside, but really it isn't.
>>
>> Are you saying that the XML does is not well formed XML or that it does
>> not validate against the schemas??
> 
> I am saying that it matters what order the XML fields are in, for instance.
> _Reading_ an XLSX file is easy because it is good XML.  The thing is, just
> because you write a good XML file doesn't mean Excel will read it.

Is that because:
A) the XSL defines an order of elements and they were written in wrong
    order?
B) the XSL specify that elements can be in any order but Excel will only
    read them in a certain order
?

>>>                                            You can write code to generate it
>>> to the standard but that doesn't mean Excel will read it.  And if Excel does,
>>> it might not in the next release.
>>
>> I would think using a well tested library to generate should make it
>> likely to work.
>>
>> LO (and OOo) seems to read and write it OK.
> 
> They do, for the current version of Excel, but when the next version comes
> out it will turn out to be touchy in other different ways.

That sounds rather weird.

MSO version N read and write OOXML version X
MSO version N+1 read and write OOXML version X+1
LO version Y read and write OOXML version X
LO version Y+1 read and write OOXML version X+1

Obviously LO version Y may not be able to read files written by MSO 
version X+1.

But how can MSO version X+1 not read files written by LO version Y?

If it can't then it would have problems reading files written by
MSO version X, which would have been noticed by a few hundred million
users.

Arne