4 ms·
This is... interesting. From my understanding - and people can correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Microsoft spend an extremely large amount of effort essential
by LittleTimothy 2y ago
This is... interesting. From my understanding - and people can correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Microsoft spend an extremely large amount of effort essentially trying to screw people who made things like this in the 2000s? Interoperability and the Open Office movement were prety hard fought. It's kind of crazy to see MSFT do this today. Did I just misunderstand and the underlying formats (docx etc) were actually pretty friendly, or have the formats evolved a lot since then? Or is it more a case of "It doesn't matter if it looks terrible because we're feeding it to the AI beast anyway"
A cynic might say it became suddenly easy when MSFT had a reason to allow you to genereate markdown to feed into it's AI?
- dmonitor 2y agoI don't think that's a cynical take considering the description > (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.)
- badlibrarian 2y agoMicrosoft filed a covenant not to sue and made all the formats open ~20 years ago. A lot of people bitched at the time but there's a long list of software that supports the format now. It is complicated because the apps themselves are complicated and decades old, and imperfect because the format or app you're converting to likely doesn't support all of the features and certainly none of the quirks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML It took browsers 15 years just to render HTML whitespace nearly consistently, so keep that in mind as you read that history.