Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 [LWN.net]

Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975

Posted Apr 16, 2012 23:03 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 by Cyberax
Parent article: Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities

there are no two ODF implementations that render complex documents the same way.

With Word, there's only one implementation and even that does not manage to render documents consistently, depending on which printer driver (and version) you have installed. This is even before you bring in other software that is ostensibly compatible. I'd say the situation is just as bad.

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Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975

Posted Apr 16, 2012 23:10 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Dependency on printer driver (actually, on paper size settings) is well-known and easy to work around. It mostly bites users when constant switching between Letter/A4 is required. Other times you can simply ignore it.

And no, Microsoft has a top-notch online collaboration suite that is almost perfectly compatible with their desktop products, we've found some inconsistencies but they were truly minor.

And no, the actual OOXML files that MS produces do not use the magic 'behave like Excel 95' entries, they are fairly straightforward and easy to parse/generate. It's pretty clear to everybody that MS tries to be bug-compatible with earlier versions so everyone who don't need to work with old documents can simply ignore these commands.