1. Tech support is often separate from tech development and customer tech support might be very removed from anything that would influence application code (in my experience in consulting firm of 25,000 with large telecom client, there were multiple outsourcing levels). Its unlikely anything not viewed as broken would get fixed based on customer feedback to a tech support operator.
2. Industry standards are often dictated by a separate architecture group who might be influenced by board level decisions that dictate say MS or IBM or JAVA standards for example. Donna [email protected] On 2013-05-10, at 11:22 PM, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote: > I think the rationale is that big chunk of users are not programmers but > they are Excel users. I get requests from end users for Excel export > capability all the time. They know Excel and how to manipulate data in it. > Sometimes if time constraints dictate it, you just make available an html > table inside a file with xls extension and you instantly got yourself some > very happy end users. With the least of cost. > For the more sophisticated users, they can just rename the file back to > html extension, or open it in Excel or similar program and then export that > data to cvs, or simple text or whatever they want (e.g. parse the data out > of the html/xml table, etc.) It's more difficult to ask the more common guy > to rename the file to .xls than to you ask the expert to rename .xls to > ..html, if they want the real format of the file. > > > On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 8:07 PM, Joey K Tuttle <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd> >> "> >> <html> >> <head> >> <title>ActivitySearchExcel</**title> >> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft Visual Studio > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
