Silurus ooxml
Document renderer in Developer tools
Renders Office XML files in the browser with fast loading and readable layouts. Critics say it often fails on real-world documents.
Renders Office XML files in the browser with fast loading and readable layouts. Critics say it often fails on real-world documents.
24 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 14
- approval share
- 42%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast browser rendering of Office files
“the rendered demo for all the file types appear to render flawlessly and load instantly on page load”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” “Rendering Office XML directly to Canvas is clever”
Comment from 8 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” Readable layouts and working previews
“The rendering does not seem to actually be pixel-perfect, but all were quite readable with a good layout”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” “the XLSX preview BLEW my mind considering this was AI coded”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” Works for claimed feature parity
“It seems to work fine for the feature parity they claim.”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” “they are all working for me”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Fails on real-world documents
“it probably gets all the halucinated assets correctly and any real world documents wrong”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” “it failed on all of them how was this project even tested for proper compliance”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” “it doesn’t seem to be replicating documents all too well”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser” - Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser”
- Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser”
- Comment from 8 Jun 2026 in “Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser”
Criticizes the OOXML format itself
“OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible.”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “TDF ejects its core developers” “Too bad the OOXML format, itself, has MS-proprietary binary blobs built into the specification as part of the format.”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor” “there is no incentive for them to make it actually easy to build competing editors off their specification”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor” - Comment from 5 Nov 2025 on Hacker News
- Comment from 29 Mar 2026 in “ODF is the future, OOXML is the past”
What people said
23 of the 26 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“are ECMA 376 compliant (I made sure), because for headless generation and handling that's kind of important”
“Rendering Office XML directly to Canvas is clever”
“no wonder it doesn't work well”
“it doesn’t seem to be replicating documents all too well”
“It seems to work fine for the feature parity they claim.”
“Well, yes, because it doesn't work.”
“it doesn't work all that well either”
“it failed on all of them how was this project even tested for proper compliance”
“I can't highlight text in Safari or Firefox on my iPhone”
“the XLSX preview BLEW my mind considering this was AI coded”
“I have a bunch of goodies at https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/go-ooxml and https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/python-office-mcp-server you might enjoy then.”
“The rendering does not seem to actually be pixel-perfect, but all were quite readable with a good layout”
“it does seem that at least slide image backgrounds and bullet point images aren't actually working”
“the rendered demo for all the file types appear to render flawlessly and load instantly on page load”
“Pretty cool, rendering PowerPoint files to an image is probably the only way for LLMs to make sense of them.”
“it probably gets all the halucinated assets correctly and any real world documents wrong”
“Also worth a look: the calculation chain docs in Microsoft's OOXML SpreadsheetML spec describe how they serialize the dep order”
“OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible.”
“Anyone using OOXML can rightly be regarded as stupid .”
“they are all working for me”
“Too bad the OOXML format, itself, has MS-proprietary binary blobs built into the specification as part of the format.”
“there is no incentive for them to make it actually easy to build competing editors off their specification”
“It's impossible to take ISO seriously after the .docx fiasco.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.