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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

An HTML file virtually unchanged in fifteen years still renders cleanly in a modern browser. Backwards compatibility across open standards is a wonderful thing.

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I'm pretty sure a .doc file created fifteen years ago also still renders in Word.

Same for a PDF file created 15 years ago or most other formats. So I don't really see your point about open standards in this case.

Yeah, you point out the winners, think back 15 years ago. How many competitors were there just in the realm of word processing? Every format but the eventual winner (which couldn't be determined at the time) is now completely useless, whereas an abundance of old dud open image formats can still be opened (which is nice because some are really easy to programmatically generate)

I don't think that's true. I can still open WordPerfect docs from 15 years ago, with less faff than it takes for, say, VRML (which was an open standard).

What's the point of your nitpick?

He's simply saying that backwards compatibility and open standards are good things in that they don't break old sites/docs/etc...

You could have just as easily said the same thing and ended with "So I don't really see your point about backwards compatibility in this case".

Backwards compatibility is often the forced result of open standards because when multiple vendors adopt those standards it is in their best interest to not make breaking changes.

This in turn is(obviously) a good thing in that things designed for those standards will remain functional indefinitely.

how easy it to render wordperfect files now?

I'm pretty sure a .doc file created fifteen years ago also still renders in Word.

Check this out: http://timtyson.us/archives/2008/01/theft-by-taking/

Old MS Office file formats were never engineered to be future proof in any way, and they're a huge headache for Microsoft, and they do indeed behave oddly in new software, and Microsoft cannot wait to get rid of them, and nobody in their right mind can blame them, honestly.

Open standards rock.

"Open standards /rock/." is a bit overblown, don't you think? There are still very real problems with open (read: sort of "open") standards. In the end we all just want something that works. There are indeed a great deal of proprietary solutions which satisfy this criteria, and continue to do so for many years.

We're much better off with formats that were documented with inter compatibility in mind in the first place. Historically, it's been quite difficult to build products that work with MSO formats as MS not only did not help meaningfully but actively seeks to hinder others from doing so - plus the format is buggy and odd. Read what Wikipedia has to say on the history of the .doc format:

>Some specifications for Microsoft Office 97 binary file formats were published in 1997 under a restrictive license, but these specifications were removed from online download in 1999. Specifications of later versions of Microsoft Office binary file formats were not publicly available. The DOC format specification was available from Microsoft on request since 2006 under restrictive RAND-Z terms until February 2008. Sun Microsystems and OpenOffice.org reverse engineered the file format. Microsoft released a .DOC format specification under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. However, this specification does not describe all of the features used by DOC format and reverse engineered work remains necessary.

I don't disagree. I'm just sensitive to the "open standards /rock/" thing. It glosses over a lot of nuance. What I'm trying to suggest is that something being an "open standard" does not necessarily make it better. Historically, there have been a number of open standards which have been failures for technical reasons, political reasons (within the community behind the standard), no good reason, etc.

> Open standards rock.

I'd like to expand on this. The Microsoft Word team is the only group of people that ever had any say over what goes in a Word document. In the old days, a Word document was nothing more than the serialized version of what Word had in memory. Photoshop files are the same way. As soon as you're not the only one with a say over the file format, you turn it into a standard. And you step up to make it a good standard because otherwise nobody's going to use it.

My conclusion is that any standards rock.

To keep going. Any standard that is not open will not open itself for multiple implementations (see old MS standards with word xml format). The problem of course is that if I cannot implement your standard, you are still the only consumer. So really:

Standards with producers/consumers from different independent teams from different organizations with different goals are awesome.

Supporting legacy HTML, JS and CSS is a breeze...

PDF was not an open standard until 2008. Just saying. It could have been abandoned by Acrobat/Adobe while it was still proprietary and you would have been left with unreadable files in 2013. That's not the first time these things happen either.

HTML is way more solid in that aspect: as long as you have a browser you should be able to open the document on any browser, any platform and get a very similar access to contents. There's nothing much comparable here... your "doc" example does not make much sense either on platforms where official Microsoft software is not available (Unix, anyone?)

It was not an open standard, but it was nonetheless rigorously documented. If you wanted to modify a PDF (as I did in 2006) it was fairly simple to create an editor in the language of your choice, using only those documents as a guide.

A .doc file created 5 minutes ago in Word can't be assumed to open correctly in any other version of Word without testing.

I used to work at a research institute and the people who used Word always spent more time getting their papers to look as nice as the LaTeX users, particularly if you crossed platforms or had change tracking enabled (hello undeletable footnote in the middle of the page…). The barrier to entry was higher but if you needed reliably consistent formatting there wasn't really a better option, with the exception of HTML5 + CSS + your favorite MathML shim if you're submitting to a really web-centric journal.

Stephenson wrote this about text editors:

> emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish [1]

I think if you replace "emacs" with "TeX" and "editing software" with "document formatting system", the quote holds just as well.

[1] http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

You're lucky you only have to read PDF or DOC files (or as somebody said: "the winners").

These last two months, I've manually parsed old databases[0], some dating back 2001. Locked formats with unknown specs, schemas embedded in applications (good luck digging that out with IDA), data storing that makes no sense, losing your hair out,...

[0] Drop me a mail if you want to reverse-engineer an HyperfileSQL DB from around Y2K, I can help on that if you pay me with Red Bull.

Well, more specifically table-based design. It Just Works (tm).

In some places, table-based designs are apparently still hip, and I come across few for localization. Gives me huge facepalm dealing with them...

you are posting on a table based design right now

Websites and companies we like are exempt from "you're doing it wrong" comments.

Since when?

Since sarcasm was invented.

At least it is for the contents that somewhat makes it understandable, being it's mostly listing of data.

What I'm talking about is table layout being used for the sole purpose of aesthetic reasons. And those I've seen so many of those sites using bad design decisions every corner (texts embedded entirely as a graphic, etc.) and they are usually one speaks out their concern about SEO...

Tables are honestly just more convenient than CSS hacks sometimes. In this case, by hacks I mean when the feeling becomes clear that you're spending more time bending CSS to do what you wanted to do with a table than the time it would've taken to maintain a table.

That's not exactly disproving his point.

Sometimes these are the result of hours of facepalming as well. And in IE7 that's just the way you do it (no display:table or table-cell supported)

Table-based layouts are indispensable for HTML emails. But then.. Outlook still uses the MS-Word rendering engine from 2007 (basically).

Unless you're blind, or trying to render the page on a different-sized browser and the tables are fixed size (because 640x480 is a Law Of Physics).

I've never understood the argument that "semantic" tags are easier to render for screenreaders. Like a screenreader knows that <em> is for emphasis, but couldn't possibly render <i> the same way it renders <em>. Or knows that a <div> must be for layout but couldn't possibly treat <table> the same way (modern UI toolkits build tables out of divs, so it's not like div-users semantically distinguish between layout and actual tabular data).

It's not the tags themselves that are "semantic" but how they are used. The semantic web is a content-first approach, as opposed to using tags to design the structure of your page. If you're adding div's to create a specific layout, you're doing it wrong.

That said, I think that CSS is inadequate for the task of controlling the layout of elements so there are very few truly "semantic" layouts.

It's the same problem as deciding whether an API is RESTful enough or not. Eventually, pragmatism wins over dogma. Still, I think (like REST) the semantic web is a good ideal to shoot for.

>knows that a <div> must be for layout but couldn't possibly treat <table> the same way //

How then would you treat actual tables, like <table noreally="true"><tr><th> ... ?

Screenreaders treat tables differently because they carry semantic weight - table headings, rows and such relate to one another in a way that mere areas of a web-page do not.

It's not the table tag that's bad, people don't [shouldn't!] use divs for marking up tabular data.

I think we miss part of the user experience of having only 640x480 pixels.

Heh, good point. Actually, if you zoom in several times, the page looks much more reasonable.

The "responsive design mode" feature in Firefox's web developer tools let's you relive the magic of 640x480.

I worked in IT around '96 and was lucky enough to commandeer a 21" 1600x1200 CRT at that time. 2d was ok, but the Pentium 90/133? I had could power Quake at 1280x1024 at about 5-10fps, so I had to crank it down several notches.

Looked great on an iPad retina in landscape. All I thought was that it has all 16 colours in it! :)

I was half expecting some if the words to blink at me, but, of course, support for the blink tag has been removed from modern browsers. Hooray for opinionated code.

A look at the source shows no blink or marquee tags, unfortunately.

and no fancy parallax, lightbox, autoscoll, or swipe to load.

This comment is spectacular, but insufficiently appreciated.

Well, blink tag was not part of the standards anyway.

This site was probably targeted at IE first, and IE never supported the blink tag.

I'm not seeing any spinninng @'s, laughing babies or "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" gifs either.

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&mu...

Ahh, that's better.

You sure it is not just good quirks mode support?

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