- From: Chris Wilson <cwilso@MICROSOFT.com>
- Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:50:17 -0800
- To: "'Jonny Axelsson'" <jonny@metastasis.net>, www-html@w3.org
Jonny Axelsson [mailto:jonny@metastasis.net] wrote: >As for Microsoft, it would be easier not to believe it is the evil empire >if MS Office didn't spout such evil code (I'd add MS Frontpage 97 to that, >2000 has supposedly improved). I would think the differences between MS Office, Windows IE and Mac IE would be making it quite clear that Microsoft is not one centralized evil empire. >The existing >(standard compliant) mechanisms are good enough to encode a Word/Excel >document... No, actually they are nowhere NEAR good enough to encode a Word or Excel document. Let alone the fact that I suspect the prime concern for Office is backwards compatibility with old Office documents - hell hath no fury like an Office user whose documents suddenly stopped working in their "new and improved" version - Word provides tons of layout and text options that simply are not covered by any Web standard. You can argue whether these mechanisms are interesting or not - frankly, I don't care - but they are part of the Office formats, and that incomprehensibly huge installed base is important to Office. They do not have the ability to start from scratch - look at the hullabaloo over the format change between Office 95 and Office 97, and that was considerably less destructive. >Anyway, removing the style tag will only split the >mess into two (the style part at the top, the rest inline). And make the management of such documents considerably more complex. >assuming that Microsoft will want to comply with XHTML 2.0 (or whereever >the deprecated style actually will be obsolete or unavailable). My point yesterday was that I believe removing the inline style attribute will make XHTML considerably less desirable, and not just for Microsoft. -Chris Wilson Internet Explorer team Microsoft
Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 12:24:56 UTC