"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <_zealand> wrote in message
news:ldo-...
> In article <1128685762.673791@ftpsrv1>,
> "E. Scrooge" <scrooge@*shot.co.nz (*sling)> wrote:
>
>>Funny thing is, as far as Word goes at least, there's hardly any
>>difference
>>in the look and use of them between the early ones and Word 8. Instead
>>Microsoft has made damn sure that they're not compatible, as far as any
>>file
>>sharing goes even if the files have the same "WPS" extensions.
>>
>>Other products get along a damn sight better. Imagine if saved jpeg
>>images
>>created on PSP won't work on any other product from any other company
>>other
>>than on PSP.
>>And that's exactly what the nonsense with these Microsoft Works products
>>is
>>like.
>
> That's the difference between open and closed data formats.
>
> With open formats, you have a lot of interoperability testing between
> different implementors. That way, any misunderstanding of the format
> specs (or any bugs/inconsistencies in them) get very quickly thrashed
> out.
>
> With Microsoft's proprietary formats, there is only ever one group
> implementing the format, and it's almost certainly the same group that
> defined the format in the first place. So they only have to define it
> clearly enough to remind themselves what they meant, which means it
> doesn't really have to be comprehensible to anybody else. And if it
> turned out there was some bug or inconsistency in the spec, well, it's
> easy enough to fix that up in the code. (Documentation? What
> documentation?) And so the spec and reality drift further apart.
>
> And then you come to the next version of the product, a few years down
> the track. People in the group have come and gone. So a new bunch of
> people have to rediscover what the previous lot meant by the previous
> spec. At the same time, they're coming up with a new spec for the new
> version. All they can do to check interoperability is test a sample of
> actual documents against both the previous code and the new code, and
> see if they can spot any obvious problems. Anything that doesn't get
> included in the test suite, doesn't get tested.
>
> And so it goes...
When it comes to WPS file no one worries if prgrams from other companies
can't read them properly, but Microsoft word processors should read the damn
things instead needing the same MS Word program that created it in the first
place.
E. Scrooge
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