Re: [tlug] Re: Why Vista Sucks

[Dave Brown <dagbrown@example.com>]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 06:09:03PM +0900, CL wrote:
> Word is an abomination of common sense that makes use of absolutely 
> senseless commands and processes.  It still cannot do simple things that WP 
> has done since v.4.0 for DOS.  If you ever want to see a programming 
> nightmare, pull a Word file into WP and hit the Reveal Codes
> command.  The means it uses to adjust type spacing, line leading, kerning, 
> and other simple typesetting functions defy description.

This is because until VERY recently, the standard way to save an MS
Office document (be it Word, Excel or whatever) was to simply take the
buffer in RAM and dump it straight to disk.  Pointers and all.

Internal memory formats make for very poor disk formats.

This is part of why the "bucket of binary sludge" document format became
so popular.  Word Perfect actually had something resembling markup
(albeit in bucket-of-binary-sludge format)--Word didn't even try.

ODF (a zip file full of insane XML) is, for all that it's crazy, still a
great improvement over standard MS Office format.

--Dave