Terry Coles wrote: > On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009, John Carlyle-Clarke wrote: > >> I get a lot of Word documents at work, both .doc and .docx. Lots of >> Word users can't open Docx either (they don't have or can't get the >> compatibility pack) so I think it's a totally pointless format. At >> least Doc - for good or ill - is a de facto standard, and now well >> reverse engineered and supported. >> > > Except that .doc isn't really a format; it's a memory dump with place holders. > > At least .docx is a proper mark-up format, although actually quite a poor > one. > It still has lots of binary blobs in it to get round the shortcomings of its > .doc legacy. > > Oh I agree, .doc is an awful format. It's just a reasonably well understood awful format! .docx starts off looking vaguely OK in theory, but it's not OOXML compliant and so is presumably soon-to-be-deprecated. OOXML is totally let down by the details of the implementation of the standard, the binary hacks, the poor documentation, and the poor execution of it in Office 2007, not to mention patent issues and all the other mess. Couple that with MS's strange journey on document formats (Office 2003 XML anyone?), one wonders what future the .docx standard has even within MS products, now that MS in theory are moving to supporting ODF, or OOXML, or something :) > And the reason for that is that .doc is just a memory dump. > > The Open Document Format used in OOo (.odt, .ods, etc) was designed from the > ground up to be a proper mark-up language based on XML so it starts from a > completely different standpoint. Unless the world abandons the format, > interoperability should get better over the years, not worse. > > Agreed again, the ODF is probably not perfect but it's a lot better than any of the alternatives. Being an open standard should allow implementations to converge rather than diverge. Then again, that didn't really work with HTML and Internet Explorer! And I'm still not sure what MS's intentions are for ODF.
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