uRandom

Thu 21st Feb 2008 @ 00:06 2008: MS Office

It seems that Microsoft have released documentation on the major MS Office file binary formats.

Good-oh.

Joel Spolsky defends the lack of clarity.

Myself, I find notes such as this, to be rather confusing:

Note The end of a section is also the end of a paragraph. The last character of a section is a
section mark which stands in place of the paragraph mark normally required to end a
paragraph. An exception is made for the last character of a document which is always a
paragraph mark although the end of a document is always an implicit end of section.

(Page 31, Word Spec.

Does that mean much to you? It doesn't help me a lot, and it doesn't suggest a cleanly-designed format.

But then again, I haven't in full; I'm really only interested in the MS Publisher format, as I try to decode that myself.

Joel suggests that a naysayer might suggest that these 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.

From what little I have glanced at, I would have to concur with they hypothetical naysayer. Joel's explanations ("we weren't thinking of interoperability") are not terribly convincing; when one version of MS Word is not compatible with another version, you have a problem anyway. The argument that RTF is a standard format is laughable; I have read the documentation, and it barely covers any features at all (headers and footers are not properly documented). CSV is another "simple" format which doesn't work properly; are quotes required around fields with spaces, or are they not required? It depends on the MS application which wrote it, and which reads it.

Joel's argument that it took thousands of coder-years to write means that it must take thousands of coder-years to be compatible is misguided, at best. The point of a document format, whether it's intended to be internal or public, is that it be clearly documented and understood, not just easy to code. At least, that's the way it's done in the professional IT world. SGML, W3C, etc etc. It makes sense even if MS assumed that their closed-source monopoly would always be accepted by every country on the planet, in perpetuity, for compatibility purposes. It's a lot easier to check that a web page is valid (it passes, or fails, the online W3C validator) than to check if a MS Office document is valid (it opens "correctly" (please define "correctly") on all versions, on all platforms).

I haven't looked at the legal requirements behind this publication, but it looks as if MS have put forward the bare minimum, whilst also acknowledging that their presumption has always been monopoly domination of the market. As that monopoly has been declared illegal, the onus to rectify it must fall on Microsoft, not on third party developers to fit in with Microsoft's formats. Microsoft are the ones who have been found guilty, not the many third parties who need to operate with their poorly-designed, poorly-written software.

Tue 12th Feb 2008 @ 00:31 2008: eBay promote PayPal in strange ways

I noticed this page on everybody's favourite twin-star, ebay/paypal, tonight:


They point out that your:

• Bank Details
• Sort Code
• Account Number
• Name
• Signature

are shared with the seller.

Putting aside the Jeremy Clarkson debacle, none of this information is particularly sensitive.

On the other hand, when people buy an online PDF from this website, via PayPal, the following personal details are provided to me, the seller, by PayPal. I can't even ask them not to tell me, even though I don't need to know anything other than the email address to send it to.



Paypal provide:

• Name
• Email
• Physical Address

Paypal do not provide:

• Bank Name
• Bank Account Number
• Sort Code
• Signature

...So what? As well as confirmation as to the validity of the details (in this case, "Verified" means that it has been proven to at least the level of detail that a bank (or even Blockbuster!) would require.

I would be more concerned about my postal address being on every cheque I wrote, than about my bank account number and sort code being passed on to PayPal merchants.

PayPal is a decent mechanism (albeit expensive for sellers, and risky for non-physical-goods sellers) for buyers, but the benefits over cheques are not really clear: Other than "Name", which is provided by cheque and by PayPal, the other stuff is all pretty harmless.

If it's for physical goods, you will obviously need to provide a postal address for the goods to be received (unless you arrange to collect), but if you can collect, or if it's online, there's no need to disclose your physical location. Paypal divulge this information whether it is needed or not.

Caveat emptor. Though of course you can trust me - get this great PDF online via paypal!. I won't tell anybody who you are, honest :-)