>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....)
Imagine you want a quick-and-dirty export for medium-competent users. You do not want to do all the configuration of sorting etc. because they want to be able to sort it in their spreadsheet anyway. You know that a file of any widespread format and with .xls extension will be opened in the spreadsheet program the user uses — whether it is Excel or LibreOffice, Calligra or something else. Now: generating valid XLS is a pain. CSV is good, but there are problems with default encoding. And HTML is opened easily by Excel _and_ contains encoding header. Also, valid HTML is not complex to parse and it is also easy to write a script that will reexport HTML file to CSV using any spreadsheet program (maybe even lynx). So it gives optimal balance of inconveniences given their distribution of user skills. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
