rowan.collins

rowan.collins

  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Why oh why couldn't they have made it possible to unpin and move to the side? If you think about it, that's far from trivial to do - you can't just rotate the ribbon interface by 90 degrees and expect...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    I mean I have multiple .dot templates and each of them is fully loaded with its own 'shortcut keys' (what I used to call 'burst keys'). [...] So instead of using Dreamweaver, or Expression Web or even notepad++ for coding...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    But for the HTML, which is meant to be a semantic markup language... Well, I think that was kind of what made the WHATWG necessary: the W3C was wholly wedded to their dream of a semantic version of HTML, which...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    I came to Word and the MS Office suite (or rather, the cut-down version of same known by the hideous misnomer of MS Works) ... Not only were Works documents incompatible with every other word processor known to humanity, they...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Also, Microsoft ruined Word when they implemented the Ribbon [...] I had to replace normal.dot with another file to fix it. Nice non-sequitur there: start complaining about a controversial UI change, then proceed with an anecdote about data corruption. I...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    I thought SGML and specifically DocBook held some promise (at least for the kinds of documentation it was designed for and backed by several free software projects), but the race to XML (why?) left us with a never-completed and now...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Heck, we still haven't converted to CSS 3, and HTML 5 has taken over a decade to agree on the standards, although they're actually rolling out now. If you're holding your breath for CSS 3, make sure your will is...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    That sounds a lot like the problem articulated by the Office 12 UI guy in the blog series I linked earlier: people frequently ask MS to add features which are already there, because they don't know how to access them....
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    As far as I can tell, Word's "help" function is far from being useful for the average user. The last version of Word I personally used ran on MSDOS, but at least it shipped with real paper documentation. What makes...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Interesting link. Allin Cottrell seems to be conflating a few different issues though: direct formatting instructions vs style hierarchies (which is related to, but not quite the same as, presentation vs semantics) WYSIWYG vs markup markup vs rendering binary vs...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Word clones with a complete lack of That Bloody Paperclip and a UI that's stayed more or less consistent between 1.0 and the latest edition, so they're ahead of Microsoft on some counts. The Office Assistant was removed completely from...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    The discussions of early versions of Word led me down a rabbit hole to a couple of interesting posts from MS staff. First, this series written at the time of the Office 12 redesign (the ribbon). http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/11/14/492482.aspx (Link is to...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    The use of RTF limits the extent to which the copying-how-MS-did-it-wrong causes problems. It should be noted that RTF is a proprietary format created by Microsoft, and (previously) developed in tandem with new versions of Word. While it is a...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Chris Harris @31 mentions a point which just may bring about some real change in this area: recent Microsoft products are increasingly, obsessively, targeting light-weight, amateur users. This is perhaps the most baffling thing about the re-designed UI and "appification"...
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