A Nader article in CounterPunch that features Prof. Matt Crawford's book, Shop Craft as Soulcraft. The book by this political philosopher discusses the borders between consumer culture and do-it-yourself.
http://www.counterpunch.org/nader09032010.html
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
Microsoft Office's XML format
Some months ago, I heard that Microsoft had introduced an XML format for its documents in around 2007. Fortunately, I was not affected until around 2010, when I was sent a document called "docx."
Now, I might understand having to get new software to support a new kind of computing need. But virtually every document on Earth has pretty much the same features, at least in terms of the user, as it has since the typewriter, or at least since Multimate and WordPerfect. Refusing to upgrade for the sake of what I knew was a document that had regular, mundane keystrokes, I went online to seek a subversive converter for it. I found something made in Russia or someplace that should have worked, but it didn't work at all. I'd installed it correctly, but it decided it needed something more than I had on my machine. I spent 40 minutes fighting with it and gave up. Tail between my legs, I asked the sender to re-send in .doc format.
The next time I encountered .docx was just today, and I knew that this too was a very typical two-page document with all text. Still, it was embedded in XML and in turn embedded in a ZIP file. I renamed the .docx to .zip and opened it in WinZip, then tried to read the XML, but that is a fool's errand, because every change of font or style in the document means the text is surruonded by around 500 to 1,000 characters of packaging, such as font changes and other things, in XML. So, as with PostScript, you're reading far more machine code than actual text.
So I had to try again to find a converter. There was OpenXML Document Viewer, which looked popular enough. What it would do is allow me to view the document in Firefox. But after installing it (and upgrading Firefox once again), opening the document showed me only a blank browser screen. I played with this for 20 minutes and gave up. (The upgrade of Firefox, by the way, made two of my other add-ons obsolete.)
I next found Word Viewer, which would open the file directly and let me view it. This actually worked fairly well in confirming for me that the document was nothing but two pages of text, nothing fancy that really required embedding in XML and obscuring for me.
Text is text. The earliest document formats were pure text, and when formatting came into vogue the game was to index plain text by character position and have the formatting in a separate place in the document. As the volume of possible (note I don't write actual) modifications to the text began to overshadow the amount of text itself, it became practical to wrap the codes around the text as "markup," which made the text harder to read for people but easier to read for other computers. Today, with .docx, there is no reading by people until the computer is precisely ready to allow it.
I've complained before about similar upgrade antics with PDF and PostScript. Still the same documents our grandparents used to read, but now they are enshrouded in layer after layer of abstraction so that, without perfect equilibrium with the rest of the electronic universe, we will never be able to read them.
When I work up the courage, I'll talk about recently using GPS for the first time. In Orlando.
Now, I might understand having to get new software to support a new kind of computing need. But virtually every document on Earth has pretty much the same features, at least in terms of the user, as it has since the typewriter, or at least since Multimate and WordPerfect. Refusing to upgrade for the sake of what I knew was a document that had regular, mundane keystrokes, I went online to seek a subversive converter for it. I found something made in Russia or someplace that should have worked, but it didn't work at all. I'd installed it correctly, but it decided it needed something more than I had on my machine. I spent 40 minutes fighting with it and gave up. Tail between my legs, I asked the sender to re-send in .doc format.
The next time I encountered .docx was just today, and I knew that this too was a very typical two-page document with all text. Still, it was embedded in XML and in turn embedded in a ZIP file. I renamed the .docx to .zip and opened it in WinZip, then tried to read the XML, but that is a fool's errand, because every change of font or style in the document means the text is surruonded by around 500 to 1,000 characters of packaging, such as font changes and other things, in XML. So, as with PostScript, you're reading far more machine code than actual text.
So I had to try again to find a converter. There was OpenXML Document Viewer, which looked popular enough. What it would do is allow me to view the document in Firefox. But after installing it (and upgrading Firefox once again), opening the document showed me only a blank browser screen. I played with this for 20 minutes and gave up. (The upgrade of Firefox, by the way, made two of my other add-ons obsolete.)
I next found Word Viewer, which would open the file directly and let me view it. This actually worked fairly well in confirming for me that the document was nothing but two pages of text, nothing fancy that really required embedding in XML and obscuring for me.
Text is text. The earliest document formats were pure text, and when formatting came into vogue the game was to index plain text by character position and have the formatting in a separate place in the document. As the volume of possible (note I don't write actual) modifications to the text began to overshadow the amount of text itself, it became practical to wrap the codes around the text as "markup," which made the text harder to read for people but easier to read for other computers. Today, with .docx, there is no reading by people until the computer is precisely ready to allow it.
I've complained before about similar upgrade antics with PDF and PostScript. Still the same documents our grandparents used to read, but now they are enshrouded in layer after layer of abstraction so that, without perfect equilibrium with the rest of the electronic universe, we will never be able to read them.
When I work up the courage, I'll talk about recently using GPS for the first time. In Orlando.
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