> it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features.
IIRC one of the many unfortunate decisions made by MS with OOXML (whether intentionally, or not, or both) is to codify a lot of display and formatting quirks directly in the schema with very little explanation or docs. Instead of making it s different namespace or layer.
So, to implement OOXML, you also needed to reverse engineer, say, behavior of Word97 etc.
IIRC one of the many unfortunate decisions made by MS with OOXML (whether intentionally, or not, or both) is to codify a lot of display and formatting quirks directly in the schema with very little explanation or docs. Instead of making it s different namespace or layer.
So, to implement OOXML, you also needed to reverse engineer, say, behavior of Word97 etc.