I refer you to Ben Langhinrichs at Genii Software with his post on “Self deprecating standards”. After you’ve read that, then I hope you’ll return back here for some additional thoughts. From what Ben writes, it seems that one source of OOXML’s length and complexity is that it had grandfathered in all sorts of special […]
Archives for October 2006
The Chernobyl Design Pattern
In 1994, the world learned that the Intel Pentium chip had a bug. In certain cases it gave the wrong answer when calculating floating-point division. These cases were rare, only 1 in 9 billion divisions, and typically only resulted in errors past the 8th decimal place. What did Intel do about this? Well, there was […]
Why is OOXML Slow?
Of course, one could simply dismiss this question, saying that a specification for an XML vocabulary does not have performance as such, since a specification cannot be executed. However, the choices one makes in designing an XML language will impact the performance of the applications that work with the format. For example, both ODF and […]
The Celerity of Verbosity
I’ve been hearing some rumblings from the north-west that Ecma Office Open XML (OOXML) format has better performance characteristics than OpenDocument Format (ODF), specifically because OOXML uses shorter tag names. Putting aside for the moment the question of whether OOXML is in fact faster than ODF (something I happen not to believe), let’s take a […]
A bit about the bit with the bits
I had an interesting meal in Paris a few weeks ago at a small bistro. I like Louisiana Cajun-style food, especially spicy andouille sausage, so when I saw “andouillette” on the menu, my stomach grumbled in anticipation. Certainly, the word ended in “ette”, but even my limited knowledge of French told me that this is […]