I agree, interesting discussion. I think it is
amazing/appalling/shocking how often similar things occur in the "real
world". One doesn't have to look far for surprising examples of bad
programming.
I have a Morgan Stanley account and use their online client services.
When looking at a transaction reporting page, they offer a button to
request a download for analysis (pretty standard stuff). Rather than
give a choice of format, they quickly and efficiently download a file
named "AccountActivity.xls"
OK, maybe using a proprietary format for Excel is a little questionable,
but several other spreadsheet programs accept it as the "industry
standard" .... but hey, when I look at the downloaded file I see the
following first few lines:
~~~
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd";>
<html>
<head>
<title>ActivitySearchExcel</title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1"
/>
<meta name="CODE_LANGUAGE" content="C#" />
<meta name="vs_defaultClientScript" content="JavaScript" />
<meta name="vs_targetSchema"
content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5"; />
</head>
<body>
<form name="Form1" method="post" action="ActivitySearchExcel.aspx"
id="Form1">
~~~
Ummm, that isn't what I would expect from a file named
AccountActivity.xls. Now it is true that newer versions of MS Excel will
open the file and display the data in a worksheet, but things like
number formats and currency symbols are not part of the deal.
When I have tried to complain about the "error" of naming an HTML file
with a .xls extension, I have been unable to make any progress at all.
Helpful technical support people are willing to guide me through things
like adjusting the column widths and adding format information in Excel,
but seem to have no concept of why I might prefer a simple plain text
(say .csv) file.
I can imagine that if one were to look into how the documents are
generated, it would show interesting things like half the time going to
parsing XML or some other similarly relevant activity.
This kind of nonsense is rampant in commercial systems.
Anyone in this forum (maybe even working at MS) have a rationale for
naming an HTML file with a .xls extension? (and distributing it to the
world....)
On 2013/05/10 15:19 , Steven Taylor wrote:
to my
distress saw that over 50% of the expenditure of time is at parsing XML.
This is of course XML used in data transfer
Ouch. Where do you begin on unravelling that one?
On 10 May 2013, at 22:39, Jo van Schalkwyk <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi All
I've been watching this thread with interest. Regarding where we waste
time, the other day I looked at an assessment of a large hospital system
(where things are almost notoriously a bit sluggish, and the information
management chaps are always fretting about efficiency, or lack thereof; we
won't even talk about their non-parameterised SQL queries) and to my
distress saw that over 50% of the expenditure of time is at parsing XML.
This is of course XML used in data transfer, and not in its original (and
sane) use as a means of formatting documents.
Jesus wept.
Jo.
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