Tuesday, February 19, 2008 10:19 AM
by
loufranco
Why Office formats are so complicated
Joel Spolsky explains why Office formats are so complicated (and why that makes sense):
A lot of the complexities in these file formats
reflect features that are old, complicated, unloved, and rarely used.
They’re still in the file format for backwards compatibility, and
because it doesn’t cost anything for Microsoft to leave the code
around. But if you really want to do a thorough and complete job of
parsing and writing these file formats, you have to redo all that work
that some intern did at Microsoft 15 years ago. The bottom line is that
there are thousands of developer years of work that
went into the current versions of Word and Excel, and if you really
want to clone those applications completely, you’re going to have to do
thousands of years of work. A file format is just a concise summary of
all the features an application supports.