David Brown wrote:
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.
All together now: "Embrace and extend."
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.
Ayup. That's the Microsoft way. And they will make sure to
brainwash^Weducate their programmers that the Microsoft-specific way is
the correct way.
From my point of view, I see no advantage to anything .Net and only a
whole lot of Microsoft pain if they somehow get the upper hand over
Java. Fortunately, most of the languages targeting the CLR also target
the JVM, so I'm covered simply by making sure that I never use a
Microsoft-specific language.
This, of course, is why I won't touch C# with a 20-foot pole.
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.
As much as I hate Microsoft, this is neither the problem nor a black
mark against Microsoft.
These formats are well-designed *for what they do*. They were never
meant for interchange. They were meant to persistently store and load
the internal state of the application *quickly*.
That's not an insignificant problem when the computer you are running on
could be a 25MHx 486 with 8MB of RAM. Then, once you write those files,
you are stuck reading them for a ton of generations.
The problem is the fact that Microsoft just really doesn't want to play
in an interoperable world. Period. And will do everything in their
power to avoid doing so.
OOXML seems to be an XML representation of the same non-designed stream of
data.
Yes, that is what it is seems like it was supposed to be.
-a
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