4 ms·

UTF-8 or GTFO. (Without BOM, you heretic.) Please tell me that you're talking about Excel 2003 ?

• chrismorgan 6y ago
  Microsoft Office worships the concept of backwards compatibility. Outlook renders HTML emails with a buggy and incomplete implementation of HTML 3.2 that has had approximately two changes in the last twenty years (one was to support high DPI, the other I can’t remember). There was that time they switched to using Trident (IE) in Outlook 2000–2003, but they switched back to MSO (Word) in 2007 for terrible reasons (“uh… security, yes, security”; their explanation was atrocious and never made a lick of sense to me; the original article talking about it went down a few years ago, if I recall correctly from last time I tried to find it). Excel sticks with known-bad and known-stupid behaviour because people depend on it. I can’t think of an example off-hand, but they literally have help pages saying “if you encounter this specific bug, here’s how to work around it”, because writing that help page was easier and/or safer than actually fixing the bug. A few months ago, scientists even renamed some human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385
  • BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Backwards compatibility doesn't have to mean to give up on forward compatibility ! (How do browsers deal with that ?)
  • SahAssar 6y ago
    Excel even implemented lotus 1-2-3 bugs to ensure compatibility: see 1900-02-29 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel-mso_other-mso_2007/bug-1900-feb-29th-is-a-valid-date-for-ms-excel/682400e0-708e-4dd7-aa22-d72bcbd16443 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...