Re: "Char Char" styles in Word

Subject: Re: "Char Char" styles in Word
From: Lou Quillio <public -at- quillio -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:56:48 -0400


Downing, David wrote:

What I'd like to know is -- Why doesn't Microsoft provide a setting
somewhere in the options that'll let you turn this "feature" off?????
But then, I guess there's no use asking why Microsoft does anything.

Even if nobody asks, there *are* answers.

If you think about it, the practical feature sets of 'office productivity' apps are essentially fixed. 95% of what 95% of users need to do is all worked out. Publishers of proprietary apps and proprietary file formats can't change that fact. They can, however, confuse the issue.

Any data construct you can represent in, say, MS Word, could always have been represented and manipulated in non-proprietary form. The evolution and penetration of 'office' apps just happened to first reach more desktops via a proprietary route. I don't think anybody (or any "thing") deserves credit for this, that's just how it happened. At first.

The future will be quite different.

Consider this XML-like representation of a document:

<document>
<page>
<header>
[text, images, programmatics for numbering, etc.]
</header>
<body>
<heading level X>
A Heading
</heading level X>
<paragraph>
Here's some text. And some more text. And some
[images and their attributes]. And some more text.
</paragraph>
<paragraph attribute="value">
[This paragraph is special because of its
attributes.]
[It can also be special because of what it's
contained by, and how it's nested within
containers.]
<paragraph>
[...]
</paragraph>
</body>
<footer>
[text, images, programmatics for numbering, etc.]
</footer>
</page>
<page>
[...]
</page>
</document>

Imagine, now, that opening an MS Word file in a text editor looked like this. Most of the time you'd use the MS Word GUI, and not think about the source file -- clicking and typing and using the features, being productive, being an expert, all that.

But when things get shaky -- as things eventually do when a GUI's abstraction layer doesn't consider how you were going to use the file -- imagine you could also be expert in source markup, source data. That you could *know* it, even if you, too, don't usually work at that level.

The MS Word file format *could've* been implemented this way. Instead, it's binary. You can't hack it. To solve gnarly problems, you have to Google or post this list or devote hours to finding arcane solutions ... and hope for the best. The only way to fix that file is by using MS Word itself, and it won't show all its cards.

Is it reticent because its greatness is beyond you, and you're better-off in the arms of MVPs?

There's a famous remark about file formats, made by Sun's Tim Bray to an EU commission last summer:

"You should have the right to own your own information.
It's your intellectual capital and you worked hard to
produce it for your citizens. Sun doesn't own it, Microsoft
doesn't own it, you own it, and that means it should be
living in a nice, long-lived, non-proprietary data format
that isn't anyone's competitive weapon."

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-06-17-a.html

Put another way, When you don't own the file format you don't own your data, not really.

This pretty much applies to everything. When an app injects itself between you and your data, it becomes a short-term productivity aid but a long-term liability. It could be both, if its formats were open. That they aren't is a lever, nothing more.

We haven't chosen enlightened tools -- gladly paying for their efficiency and support without mortgaging our futures and those of the enterprises we work for -- because they didn't exist at first. Now they do. DocBook. HTML instead of CHM (compiled HTML). OpenOffice. Everything OASIS does.

char -> char -> char->? Needless and aggressively desperate complexity -- and wrong-headed, besides. Character-level formatting hints can draw their identity from semantics and context alone. There's no need to map them to existing styles from another context.

Documents are simple. Information exchange can be simple. Some folks don't want them to be.

LQ

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