[PRL] Martian Headsets

Tue Mar 18 22:50:14 EDT 2008

Courtesy of UNIX's fortune:

Q:      What do you get when you cross a mobster with an international standard?
A:      You get someone who makes you an offer that you can't understand!

Dimitris

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Mitchell Wand <wand at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> On the same theme, Joel published a piece last month titled
> Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? in which he talks
> about the backward compatibility issues there.  Fascinating stuff.
>
> --Mitch
> >
> >
> > Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These
> formats appear to be almost completely insane...
> > If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend
> writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system,
> or creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the
> complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty
> darn quickly. A normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file
> formats:
> >
> >
> > are deliberately obfuscated
> > are the product of a demented Borg mind
> > were created by insanely bad programmers
> > and are impossible to read or create correctly.
> >
> > You'd be wrong on all four counts.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 11:12 PM, Dave Herman <dherman at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > The robustness principle was actually the right thing,
> > > but you also need a Spanky mode.
> >
> > I think I agree, although there are still hard questions of a) default
> > behavior and b) the nature of the agreement between the
> > platform/language/browser and the client/programmer/web developer.
> >
> > The robustness principle was a big part of the success of the
> > web--anyone, no matter how sloppy, could create a web page. But it's
> > impossible to support both progress in browser implementations and
> > continuity of behavior; as Joel alludes, there are multiple instances
> > where people have discovered ways to exploit one IE bug to circumvent
> > another. Now MS has to choose between continuity and progress. From what
> > I can tell, the pragmatic answer almost always seems to be: keep the
> > quirky, old behavior the default, but allow people to opt into a new
> > mode. It's not clear to me how many times you can get away with this
> > before your code base sinks under the complexity of countless modes,
> > emulated bugs, etc.
> >
> > So you could also try to set things up where the browser vendor makes no
> > guarantees (beyond, say, a best effort) to provide continuity in
> > behavior for default mode, but offers stricter modes with stricter
> > guarantees. Back 8 or 9 years ago, XHTML kinda looked like it was trying
> > to do that... except XHTML is a joke. (From what I hear, it's a pretty
> > textbook case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.) I think one
> > of the most impractical aspects of XHTML was that it was a parallel
> > standard, and parallel standards just can't keep pace with the real
> > standard. Especially when you're talking about big multi-party standards
> > sloths (W3C) competing with the ultra-competitive market.
> >
> > But I think human nature is another problem with XHTML: offer the world
> > a strict version and a sloppy version, and they use the sloppy one.
> > Almost no one uses XHTML. And the browser vendor doesn't have the luxury
> > of an explicit contract with the world: browsers are free, they have
> > billions of clients, and if they don't do exactly what the clients want,
> > they lose in the court of public opinion. It's like an unwritten
> > contract where the client gets to dictate all the terms, except the
> > service provider has to guess what they are.
> >
> > As for Spanky mode, this was the thing in Joel's post that made me slap
> > my forehead, because it's been staring me in the face for years now. I
> > never really appreciated Spanky's potential for compatibility testing. I
> > hope our reference implementation of ECMAScript 4 becomes useful for
> > that. Unfortunately, the Achilles heel of the Spanky approach is that it
> > relies on MS being relatively faithful to the spec.
> >
> > As an aside, it's kind of hilarious that for years the W3C have treated
> > XHTML and CSS validators ("yep-- I think that's a web page!") as somehow
> > helping people create portable web apps.
> >
> >
> > > One of the nice things
> > > about a Spanky mode is that it reveals as much about the
> > > errors made in the standard itself as in the individual
> > > artifacts that attempt to conform to the standard.
> >
> > Indeed. In our SML implementation of ES4, we've gotten a lot of mileage
> > out of using the MLton compiler as a pedantically standards-compliant
> > implementation of SML. One thing I've learned from using it is that SML
> > totally screwed the pooch on the definition of `withtype'. It has
> > non-nesting binding semantics (let instead of let*), which pointlessly
> > restricts its usefulness. I never even knew that SML/NJ violated the
> > standard, preferring the better semantics over compliance, until I tried
> > compiling our code with MLton.
> >
> >
> > > It should also be noted that IE was notorious for its
> > > poor adherence to standards.  Microsoft created its own
> > > dilemma.  That's the real moral of Joel's story.
> >
> > Joel is one of MS's biggest critics, so I doubt he'd disagree with you.
> > But still, there's no denying that when it comes to software evolution,
> > success is its own worst enemy.
> >
> > Dave
> >
> >
>
>
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