5 ms·

I think the worst would be .doc extensions instead of .docx Other than that, give me WP5.1 baby

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
IMO, .doc might be the second worst format ever invented (second to PDF). It is a proprietary, binary only format for storing text documents. Who thought that was a good idea?
- idiot900 5y ago
  It's an artifact of a time when RAM was extremely expensive and CPUs were slow. Dumping the in-memory binary representation to a disk was apparently the logical choice at the time.
  - Taywee 5y ago
    Too bad SQLite didn't exist at the time. It would be a pretty good candidate for something like that without eating bogs of memory for large documents. To be fair to the Office team of the day, when your company also develops the compiler and can guarantee the safety of writing and loading raw structures under specific constraints (even in ways that violate programming language standards), it's not too bad of an idea. Not that it's the greatest, as even then there were certainly better ways of doing it, but the landscape of serialization wasn't as nice as it is now.
    - p_l 5y ago
      SQLite would not be a good choice. DOC file format, combined with OLE containers, was designed at least partly to deal with common practice of keeping documents on floppies, and to make saving documents as speedy as possible. This meant a combination of pseudo filesystem (OLE containers can be summarised as a variation of FAT filesystem) and blittable data structures. This way when you saved an updated version of the document, Word would only extend the file with new changes, minimizing amount of I/O necessary. Another aspect to this was that DOC was not supposed to be interchange file format - that's a role that was supposed to belong to RTF. Which was much easier to parse and had formal, published specification instead of memory dumps of internal data structures. However it took a more resources to update such file, so RTF and DOC were kept in sync when it came to capabilities all the way to Office 2003 - everything you could do in DOC, you could do in RTF, and vice-versa. Of course, practice quickly went in different direction and most people only think of RTF as the simpler sibling of DOC, because WordPad on Windows used it.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    Quick and easy for the devs too I bet.
    - p_l 5y ago
      Not quick nor easy at all - it was an optimization for end users.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  I cant judge .doc on its technical merits, but its closed nature is really something. Rumor is that, in the end, even MS didn’t understand the format?
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  PDF is possibly the most successful technology in computing history.
- bitwize 5y ago
- Lammy 5y ago
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Photoshop is said to be on par. Similar reasons behind the 'format' .. or dump.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Why is pdf bad in your opinion?
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    It's a 2000 page spec that links to other specs (eg JPEG, PNG). It is a turing complete document format that can run arbitrary code without a sandbox. It is a mix of a binary and text format (some opcodes are in binary, some in text which just why?). All in all, it is a format designed to be incredibly hard to implement so people just give up and pay adobe.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Other than some stupid feature of it (like some of the ones you mentioned, maybe also forms), I really don’t think it is too hard to implement - there are plenty of open-source pdf reader libraries.
      - leni536 5y ago
        Plenty as in poppler, mupdf and pdfium? Are there others?
        kaba0 5y ago
        There are open-source libraries as well for e.g. Java, C# and I guess a bunch of other languages.
      - aembleton 5y ago
        20 years ago, fresh out of uni, my first job was working on some delphi that modified pdfs. With no libraries! That was painful.
      - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        From what I've seen, most of the libraries out there are some mix of incomplete and slow. From my testing (from a few years ago), most of them supported about 80% of the documents you would see in the wild. Good support for FDF (form fillable PDF) was really bad pretty much across the board.
- Yaa101 5y ago
  PDF is not for making documents with, it's for making bundled printouts that almost universally are printed right on most printers.

IMO, .doc might be the second worst format ever invented (second to PDF). It is a proprietary, binary only format for storing text documents. Who thought that was a good idea?

idiot900 5y ago
It's an artifact of a time when RAM was extremely expensive and CPUs were slow. Dumping the in-memory binary representation to a disk was apparently the logical choice at the time.
- Taywee 5y ago
  Too bad SQLite didn't exist at the time. It would be a pretty good candidate for something like that without eating bogs of memory for large documents. To be fair to the Office team of the day, when your company also develops the compiler and can guarantee the safety of writing and loading raw structures under specific constraints (even in ways that violate programming language standards), it's not too bad of an idea. Not that it's the greatest, as even then there were certainly better ways of doing it, but the landscape of serialization wasn't as nice as it is now.
  - p_l 5y ago
    SQLite would not be a good choice. DOC file format, combined with OLE containers, was designed at least partly to deal with common practice of keeping documents on floppies, and to make saving documents as speedy as possible. This meant a combination of pseudo filesystem (OLE containers can be summarised as a variation of FAT filesystem) and blittable data structures. This way when you saved an updated version of the document, Word would only extend the file with new changes, minimizing amount of I/O necessary. Another aspect to this was that DOC was not supposed to be interchange file format - that's a role that was supposed to belong to RTF. Which was much easier to parse and had formal, published specification instead of memory dumps of internal data structures. However it took a more resources to update such file, so RTF and DOC were kept in sync when it came to capabilities all the way to Office 2003 - everything you could do in DOC, you could do in RTF, and vice-versa. Of course, practice quickly went in different direction and most people only think of RTF as the simpler sibling of DOC, because WordPad on Windows used it.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  Quick and easy for the devs too I bet.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Not quick nor easy at all - it was an optimization for end users.
tagoregrtst 5y ago
I cant judge .doc on its technical merits, but its closed nature is really something. Rumor is that, in the end, even MS didn’t understand the format?
ghostly_s 5y ago
PDF is possibly the most successful technology in computing history.
bitwize 5y ago
Lammy 5y ago
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
agumonkey 5y ago
Photoshop is said to be on par. Similar reasons behind the 'format' .. or dump.
kaba0 5y ago
Why is pdf bad in your opinion?
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  It's a 2000 page spec that links to other specs (eg JPEG, PNG). It is a turing complete document format that can run arbitrary code without a sandbox. It is a mix of a binary and text format (some opcodes are in binary, some in text which just why?). All in all, it is a format designed to be incredibly hard to implement so people just give up and pay adobe.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Other than some stupid feature of it (like some of the ones you mentioned, maybe also forms), I really don’t think it is too hard to implement - there are plenty of open-source pdf reader libraries.
    - leni536 5y ago
      Plenty as in poppler, mupdf and pdfium? Are there others?
      - kaba0 5y ago
        There are open-source libraries as well for e.g. Java, C# and I guess a bunch of other languages.
    - aembleton 5y ago
      20 years ago, fresh out of uni, my first job was working on some delphi that modified pdfs. With no libraries! That was painful.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      From what I've seen, most of the libraries out there are some mix of incomplete and slow. From my testing (from a few years ago), most of them supported about 80% of the documents you would see in the wild. Good support for FDF (form fillable PDF) was really bad pretty much across the board.
Yaa101 5y ago
PDF is not for making documents with, it's for making bundled printouts that almost universally are printed right on most printers.