Parsing Excel Spreadsheets with Swift's Codable Protocols

Re:Parsing Excel Spreadsheets with Swift's Codable Protocols by amaccuish on Monday November 12, 2018 @02:47PM (#18435109)

> Are there lessons from specs we can learn? Do the good ones have some sort of "concept" section that makes the reading of it easier? Does each subsection do that?

Look at the OpenDocument Format. Does the same as Office Open XML (the microsoft one) in only a few hundred pages.

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Re:Parsing Excel Spreadsheets with Swift's Codable Protocols by tzs on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:26PM (#18436541)

ODF is a bit more than a few hundred pages. Here's the page counts for ODF 1.2:

  102 pages, OpenDocument-v1.2-os.pdf
  846 pages, OpenDocument-v1.2-os-part1.pdf
  234 pages, OpenDocument-v1.2-os-part2.pdf
   35 pages, OpenDocument-v1.2-os-part3.pdf

That's 1217 pages.

It is quite a bit smaller than OOXML. OOXML is about 5-6 times the size of ODF. There are three reasons for this.

1. ODF has cleaner and leaner markup. OOXML is uglier and more verbose, leading to more things that the spec has to document..

2. The OOXML spec goes into more detail for a lot of things that the two have in common.

3. The OOXML spec seems to have a lot more introductory or primer material.

The impression I got from looking at both, but not actually trying to use either of them, is that if I had to implement a full featured office suite solely from the spec, with no reference implementations or example documents, it would be easier if I picked ODF, but would probably have better interoperability if I picked OOXML. The strongest impression I got, from both of them, though, is that there is no freaking way I want to implement an office suite!

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