On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 01:35:15AM -0700, DJA wrote:
Which standard has MS created or invented, or even actively promoted? There are lots of standards. You talk as if there is only One Standard(tm) in the computing world.
They've actually played fairly nicely with the CLR/C# standards. This isn't too surprising, since they're entering a market that already has a well-established language and runtime. I guess they figure they can compete better by actually standardizing their implementation. That doesn't keep them from their normal approach of going beyond the standard and implementing all kinds of extra stuff to keep things incompatible, though. I suspect people are referring to the office file formats. Standard or not, these are close to the worst possibly file formats one could come up with for interchange. It's basically a serialized object dump of the particular version of the program that wrote the file. They have to include support for all of the old versions. It doesn't resemble a file format that got any forethought. It should receive a failing grade, or have failed a design review. OOXML seems to be an XML representation of the same non-designed stream of data. David -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
