Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Ben Scott
On 3/9/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I thought you were way smart enough to guess why. It was to make a joke ... Ah. Well. Obviously, I didn't get it. Maybe the joke's been made too often, and isn't funny anymore. Or maybe I like jokes, but when they're used in place of

Re: Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Jeffry Smith
On 3/11/07, Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It seems possible that a more accurate depiction of the facts would be that OOXML includes a compatibility mode to support existing spreadsheets that assume a bug that dates back to before Microsoft even had a spreadsheet product. Which brings

Re: Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Nigel Stewart
It actually sounds like OOXML isn't as bad as the C standard, because at least OOXML gives you the *option* of not incorporating the bug. The year is 2007, as nice as it would be to update the C standard to fix all these bugs, we're talking about OOXML. If the point

Re: Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Ben Scott
On 3/11/07, Nigel Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The year is 2007, as nice as it would be to update the C standard to fix all these bugs, we're talking about OOXML. This argument that OOXML is brand new and thus should have no legacy baggage is bogus. OOXML

Re: Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Ben Scott
On 3/11/07, Jeffry Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [the backwards compatibility provision in OOXML] ... are all things that should be in a conversion program - not a modern data storage format. I don't think it's that simple, for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere [1]. Effecting simultaneous

Re: Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Jeffry Smith
On 3/11/07, Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/11/07, Jeffry Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [the backwards compatibility provision in OOXML] ... are all things that should be in a conversion program - not a modern data storage format. I don't think it's that simple, for reasons I've

Re: Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Nigel Stewart
Ben, Now, it's sounds real nice to say things like Let's jettison all this legacy baggage and start from a fresh, clean design, but reality doesn't work that way. There are huge costs associated with starting from scratch. In this case, we're talking about potentially large numbers of legacy

Re: Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900 (was: Ecma responses to ISO)

2007-03-11 Thread Jon 'maddog' Hall
Ah. Well. Obviously, I didn't get it. Maybe the joke's been made too often, and isn't funny anymore. Or maybe I like jokes, but when they're used in place of of serious discussion, instead of along with it, I get irritated. Meh. I am truly sorry to have irritated you. In the case