Is this a comment or rant ?
Both!
"I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
81–90 of 91 posts
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#82PSD was never intended to be a data interchange format: it is the serialization format of a single program that has more individual unrelated features that actual people rely on than almost any other piece of software and has maintained striking amounts of backwards compatibility and almost unbroken forwards compatibility during its over two decades of existence. This product's "file format" needs to be critiqued in…
If a wise programmer decided he needs a serialization format, would he deliberately include in that format all the crap so vividly pointed to by the article? No. He will think of the "serialization format" as an interchange format between two different instances of his program. One process first writes the data file and another process later will read it. He also knows that sooner or later the "serialization format"…
Not to mention security bugs too.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a wise programmer decided he needs a serialization format, would he deliberately include in that format all the crap so vividly pointed to by the article? No. He will think of the "serialization format" as an interchange format between two different instances of his program. One process first writes the data file and another process later will read it. He also knows that sooner or later the "serialization format"…
Word dates back to 1983, while OLE was only introduced in 1990 (but otherwise I think you are correct)
Office 97 dates back to 1996.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#84Whilst I enjoy jwz's writings, please follow the hacker news guidelines which can be found at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In particular: Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. The original source is https://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/XeePhotoshopLoad... Also: Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or…
Well, from an archival point of view, jwz's blog post I expect will last for some time (I believe he understands the value of durable URLs). On the other hand, either Google Code or the Xee project have managed to break the direct link that was submitted to HN last time (less than 4 years ago).
So that Google code link is the original source today, but it might not be tomorrow.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#85Has been on HN before ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575122 ) but it was years ago. I mention this just in case others are having the same feeling of deja vu as me.
I kept looking for a twist — jwz's “It seems very familiar to me” indicated one — but it's just a repost then.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#86I like the 'sanity check' at the bottom. :)
should clearly just return false. ^^
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
So just out of curiosity, why doesn't Adobe embark on those two projects? We're entering a new era of desktop software, surely that should be a catalyst for redesigning both from scratch?
And cut all backwards compatibility in doing so? Risky move indeed. Not so sure the benefits would make up for it.
Photoshop is an example of software that must also remain backward compat with the human systems that use it. There are lots of professions that are essentially "Photoshop Expert". If features are removed, altered, or even if keyboard shortcuts are changes, it has a very real effect on these peoples' livelihoods. There are few novice Photoshop users compared to other software.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#88This reminded me of just how nice the Doom WAD format is: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/WAD
When a friend complained that he had a hard time figuring out which maps were present in a given WAD, I enjoyed myself while writing a utility to organize them into directories with map numbers. I kept thinking: this is how you serialize data. Looking back on the code now, it's still easy to understand.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it wouldn't cut backwards compatibility at all. They have made plenty of additions to the format over the years, and they give you the option of saving to be compatible with previous versions. They could just keep doing that.
> They could just keep doing that Then it wouldn't be a new, "clean" format. Then it'd be the old format with additions. Which it already is. Your post makes no sense to me.
There is no technical reason they would need to use the old fileformat at all. "Keep doing that" referred to give the user an option of what photoshop version he would like the saved file be comparible with. If he pick the latest version, the new file format would be used.
Re: "I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
ODT is also XML-based, to Docx's problems compared to ODT can't be blamed on XML.
I never said it has anything to do with XML. OOXML is extremely complex for little reason. Even though it is also quite complex, ODT is much, much simpler.
There are actually reasons for some of OOXML's weirdness, just not good ones. For instance, it appears the reason why OOXML is pretty much the only XML-based document format which doesn't use a mixed content model is because there's a huge amount of prior art that'd have made it impossible to patent if they had. (Microsoft tried anyway though.)