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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

I am deeply disappointed that a company like Microsoft doesn't make a point of Microsoft Word being able to open any document created by any version of Word, no matter how ancient it is. I think they have the social/historical/economical responsibility of doing so.

If they are worried about vulnerabilities in the old parsing code, move it to an external process, run it under isolation in a sandbox to spit out a newer readable version on the fly, but don't eliminate this capability from the software.

EDIT: zokier pointed out to me that the desktop version of Word opens the file fine, it is only the web version that doesn't. So, consider this post void.

EDIT 2: Well it opens the document, but is not able to display or print the embedded graphics, it seems.

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Many old formats were essentially just binary dumps of memory, or something not far removed. Documenting the formats was not a standard. Yes, I agree that there is a social responsibility, but having worked in digital archiving I can tell you that the olden days were really, really messy. No, really.

This is the point that many of the commenters who criticize Microsoft are missing, and it's why the old formats are not enabled by default (security vulnerabilities) and why it's not as simple as creating a parser.

Microsoft still deserves criticism for designing their old word formats so badly. It was a design choice to turn documents of mostly text into obscure binary formats that were badly standardized and maintained.

Not true at all. Some of Microsoft's best minds created extremely ingenious methods that allowed early word processors to be usable on files that were dramatically larger than what would fit in memory. OSes didn't support suitable performance via VM infrastructure at the time. It was clever, outside of the box thinking that got MS to be able to beat WordPerfect (a worthy competitor) and the many other also-rans.

There was (contrary to popular belief) not a deliberate strategy to limit interoperability. It was simply the reality of the approaches utilized that made them tightly coupled to the MS Word codebase and less standardizable than would have otherwise been ideal.

Source: one of the guys who worked on it at MS.

no they don't.

They were effectively working at embedded scale, trying to capture state within tremendously limiting constraints.

This is a case of interpreting past decisions based on current criteria, when those same conditions would have prevented modern methods from being implemented.

> Microsoft still deserves criticism for designing their old word formats so badly.

I would love to see some modern devs try to write software for a 68000 system with only 512K of memory

Word 4.0 ran from floppy disks on PC XTs (8088 CPU) with 320 KB of RAM. You can't afford an elaborate parser in such limited memory, or you'd have to swap out its implementation on floppy on every load and save. Just running the parser would have slowed down document loading significantly. The floppy disk capacity also wasn't much larger. You already had to swap the disks for doing spell checking or similar. For comparison, the first web browser (WorldWideWeb) was an executable of about 1 MB and ran on a much faster 32-bit NeXT computer with 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive.

You don't have to go anywhere near 1990 to find issues with modern Microsoft (especially cloud) apps opening documents created in older ones!

Indeed. If I ever end up in the cloud version of Word (or indeed any other app) my first instinct is to click 'Open in App'.

Is there any commercial software development company with better backwards compatibility creds than Microsoft? I'm genuinely curious.

Old file formats have security vulnerabilities. The online version of Word is designed for docx only, although it can open certain binary documents.

Fundamentally, a data file format can't have vulnerabilities. At most it can be prone to vulnerabilities, but more often it's just that popular implementations are bad.

Sorry, the Word parser does and Microsoft did not feel it important enough to fix as their focus is on OpenXml formats.

Then that's on Microsoft. There's no fundamental reason why a secure parser can't be written for old formats.

Why would Microsoft do that? It makes zero financial sense to continue with a parser that may need to be rewritten from scratch for a ~30 year old format.

they can do what they want, and i'll continue on my 2 decade long decision to never give microsoft money, for anything. Same way i'll never give propellerhead another dime, or Plex[0], or any of these other consumer-hostile companies.

I don't trust MS to maintain software, even though as far as that goes, they're better than a lot of companies that have been writing software for decades. "time marches on" is silly when we have millions of times the compute, storage, and transit speeds available to us. I also don't see why people see the need to shill for multi-billion dollar companies.

What microsoft should have done is trademark a new name for their word processor the second they made the decision to not open word .doc from older versions. That way there's no confusion.

[0] having a hard time remembering the name/company of the software i purchased for in-house streaming over a decade ago. Plex is still a hassle to use for in-house streaming compared to the "service" or whatever they're selling. Unfortunately Synology seems to have grown weary of releasing a version of their client for every newfangled device that comes to market, so i'm stuck with plex on my TV; that is, unless i want to use a stick/set-top/computer attached to it.

> I don't trust MS to maintain software

Then you should champion removal of any "old" software they have that is under maintenance-only status. You wouldn't want security vulnerabilities to go unfixed, would you?

> What microsoft should have done is trademark a new name for their word processor the second they made the decision to not open word .doc from older versions. That way there's no confusion.

That makes zero sense. Word is still Word. It performs the same tasks (and more) as Word 1.0 did.

And Word today still reads/writes .doc, just not versions that are that old.

No they don't. Parsers can have security vulnerabilities, but you can fix those, and there's little reason why a parser for an old format would have more vulnerabilities than for a new format. Some formats can also have certain (intended) features that have security implications, but parsers can choose to disable them if they are concerned.

You missed the fact that the real Word does open this file just fine, its just the toy web version that has issues (and maybe Mac too but eh)

Oh, really? I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing this out.

No, you're not wrong, another commenter points out that latest Word opens the document but doesn't display the graphics.

The Office 365 Mac version refuses to open it.

You can recover text but the result is horrible. No graphics and all formatting lost.

Yes, it opens it and throws away the graphics, so not "just fine".

If we go into splitting hairs, it doesn't really throw the graphics away, it simply lacks the "filter" to display them but they are there still, as in it recognizes the graphics object correctly and lays out it on the page. Based on the error message, hypothetically I suppose you could even make a custom filter to handle the object.

But this really goes more into the facet of Office files that allowed embedding pretty much anything into them, and relying on this "filter" system (I guess OLE) to handle embedded objects. So while the DOC file itself is getting parsed and rendered pretty much perfectly, the embedded objects are another story.

In the same sense I'd say browser might open some HTML page "fine" even if it doesn't know how to handle some image format that is used on the page; it'd still handles the HTML correctly.

Makes me wonder if the graphics are in PICT format

I think they are. You can even find some PICT files inside the ODT in the github from TFA

if you read the blog, the main point of OP’s project was to get at the diagrams, so hardly “splitting hairs”.

This is expected with the web versions of Office. They can read (certain) binary Office formats but not edit them. The web version of Office is designed for OpenXml file formats.

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