"You have to standardize the format"

"OK we will standardize our serialization format"

It's... I guess malicious compliance, though also if you don't care about interop you're not going to try to abstract away your internal application structures, are you!

I appreciate the standard existing rather than it not existing. Trying to have the standard exist in this way has always felt like an uphill battle, and at least now there's _something_.

Just you will have a better time if you emulate how Office does things. But you have a bit more documentation to go along with it.