November 29th, 2006

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A New XML Document?

Everytime I start a new document in Microsoft Word 2003 (which, mercifully, is pretty rare these days), I make a little scoffing noise. When you click New on the File menu, Word presents you with the following options:

What miniscule segment of all Word users ever want to create a new XML document? What fraction of Word users even know what an XML document is? And what self-respecting XML-savvy person would ever choose Word to create XML documents, anyway? This is classic feature bloat at its worst.

Clearly the item shouldn’t even be an enabled option. It certainly shouldn’t be the second-ranking option, ahead of those other peculiarities, web pages and email messages.

UPDATE: Speaking of software wackiness:

Parser Module

Can the pantsing module pants the file? Can the purser module purse the file? There’s a whole industry of people who write clear, helpful error messages–why can’t Adobe afford one of them?

Comments: 4 Responses so far

gillian
November 29th, 2006
2:35 pm

XML is the future, didn’t you know that?

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vieux bandit
November 29th, 2006
3:30 pm

Hmmm years ago I had to ARGUE with a techie at work so that he would allow me to reinstall software he’d deleted on the server so I’d have something wysiwyg (I was preparing documents that someone else would later have to work on, code would just not work for them) to work on my html documents. He first suggested I use… WORD! ARGH! I had to actually show him what Word did to my tables before he begrudgingly agreed to my request (then he left my desk while still logged in as server admin, but that’s whole other story!). Clueless, clueless, clueless.

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brem
November 29th, 2006
7:03 pm

Problem is companies don’t want to invest in good tech writers. Programmers are left with writing messages, and frankly, they, we, couldn’t care less. :)

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Jenn
December 1st, 2006
8:43 pm

I’ve gotten the same adobe photoshop error before too….then again, I’ve had a few off the wall errors in photoshop…most of which I’ve been able to remedy…once I figure out what they’re talking about…and the error thing isn’t just photoshop. I’ve had some errors that are similar in illustrator and imageReady.

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