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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.

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I hear that refrain often regarding Microsoft, but with games, I have not had good luck. I resort to using GOG, which itself ends up virtualizing the environment anyway. For example, I do not think anyone would have success installing the original Sim City on Windows 11.

Fallout 3 was unplayable (without mods/patches) on Windows 10 for many years because of its dependency on "Games for Windows Live" from Windows 7

Yeah, people frequently trot out the Sim City classic example, but the fact is that games in particular have borne the brunt of Windows API changes. If it didn't happen we'd have no need for wrappers like dgVoodoo: software once only meant to wrap Glide calls, but now used to get around deprecation to DirectX as well. Not to mention the breaking changes to the audio stack that happened between 9x and Vista.

A file that was written in Word '97 did not even open exactly as expected on two different computers 25 years ago. Formatting depended on the installed printer drivers. Good luck with that document today.

My LaTeX files from 35 years ago, on the other hand - they just do fine.

>My LaTeX files from 35 years ago, on the other hand - they just do fine.

Yeah, because they're plain text. A fairer comparison would be whether they render pixel perfectly as 35 years ago, which I doubt.

If you compile them to DVI you'll get the same DVI file.

Compiled to PDF you might get very slight differences.

>the same DVI file.

Which is used by approximately no one. Good luck uploading your resume in DVI.

Good luck uploading your CV in PDF. I tried that a few times and got moaned at a load that my CV must be in Word format. In the end I converted the PDF into images, and created a Word document in OpenOffice (this was a while ago) with one page image per page. Got moaned at for that too.

The only reason they want your resume at all is to run a keyword extractor over it. If you know this, why are you making their job harder?

Heh. A buddy of mine once applied for a Linux job and sent his resume as a PDF. They called him back: "OMG, you're the only applicant who didn't send a Word file. We're not worthy."

Did he create the PDF in LaTeX?

I haven't had that experience for a single job that I ever applied to. Always sent in PDFs without any issues.

Recruiters and large firms tend to ask for a Word file. I sent the plaintext file (minimal markdown) I used to generate the pdf to a recruiter recently. They directly asked for a docx instead.

Recruiters probably edit the file before passing it on to the actual business... Add some more buzzwords, remove direct contact information, obscure exact project details. Some recruiters play quite dirty business and likewise assume the worst of their customers.

That is exactly the complaint I got about my word-document-with-page-images. The recruiter couldn't work out how to edit it. I saw the CV they actually ended up sending to one of the workplaces I interviewed at. They had retyped it, and it looked awful.

> Recruiters and large firms tend to ask for a Word file.

Again, not my experience at all.

I think if a company didn't accept my PDF CV and asked for a Word file instead, I'd strongly reconsider whether I'm actually interested in working there.

If you're rendering to DVI, it's explicitly defined as a bug if it doesn't compile to exactly the same pixel-perfect output as a previous version.

They're not plain text, they're a text encoded structured file format. And the file format is stable.

A stable file format is the most important difference here, but the text encoding means that small incompatibilities can be solved by a human rather than needing to rely on an upstream maintainer to recognize and explicitly handle your unique situation.

If I recall correctly, the common phenomenon where you open a Word document, immediately close it, and are asked whether you want to save your changes (???) has something to do with printer settings.

A file from 1997? Maybe if you get lucky, but there's also a good chance that it will simply look wrong in any office application you try. With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting. That was the reason I learned TeX.

And games? Microsoft broke numerous games by shutting down GFWL. I had to pirate Dark Souls as my original copy wasn't playable until it got re-released on Steam.

>With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting.

Source? This seems utterly bizarre.

I don't know if anything's changed but for a long time a lot of Word's formatting was impacted by the printer you had installed and/or selected. So it was pretty easy to run into scenarios on a network where printers being taken offline/their capabilities changed resulted in documents getting reformatted.

Difficult to prove considering that was a decade ago, but it did happen to me. Randomly changed font in a random paragraph, randomly repositioned images, etc. Maybe I accidentally broke the document in some way, I don't know, but Word certainly failed to restore it to the exact state it was saved in, and it was always on the same PC and software.

Before the new '.docx`, '.xslx', etc. formats, when it was still just .doc, .xsl, etc., the document format was (as I've heard it told) essentially just a memory dump of Word/Excel's state for that document at the time you saved. And since it's easy to imagine that serializing/deserializing such a complex thing might not be always 100% perfectly idempotent, it would indeed happen that just the act of opening a file would change it in some subtle way.

That hasn't been the case in a long time, though.

the new formats are actually zip archives believe it or not

They are ZIP archives... of XML. That's what the 'x' stands for in '.docx', '.xlsx', '.pptx', etc; it is Office Open XML[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#:~:text=Office....

They were reportedly written as memory dumps for speed.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...

Worse than subtle formatting changes was some kind of corruption that could slowly swallow bits of your document without you noticing. Sometimes going back before the corruption had visible effects was not good enough to stop it from manifesting again.

I remember back in school religiously saving new versions of Word documents so that if the newest version went bad I could start a fresh doc, then copy and paste sections from old versions via Notepad to cleanse the corruption. (Direct Word-to-Word could bring it across — I guess that tells us something about how they implemented copy+paste between documents, too!)

You're right, Office documents were essentialy a memory dump, but only for Office <= 95 if I recall correctly.

Starting from Office 97, they switched to an improved .doc, .xsl, etc. file format (even though it was still binary).

That's why modern software such as Office itself or LibreOffice call the .doc format "Microsoft Word 97/2003"

I had the same with OpenOffice (before LibreOffice was a thing). I created a nice document while logged in remotely to a Linux computer over Xvnc. When I opened it on the native terminal, the layout was different. Same computer, same version of OpenOffice, different X server.

MS-DOS software doesn't work on modern 64-bit windows

you get a dialog saying "unsupported"

now you can download dosbox but that isn't really "exactly as expected"

I wish this was actually truthful. I’ve had a gigantic headache getting every childhood game I kept working. In almost every case I gave up or re-bought from GOG, basically paying for the work done to sort out compatibility.

I think the reason this is getting a negative reaction is because he doesn't really clearly state the problem he's actually trying to solve until the end (and describes it as "bonus chatter" when it's actually just a much better explanation than he gives at the top of the article).

> To clear up some confusion: The idea here is that the printing API has always existed on desktop, where printing is supported, and the “get me the list of printers” function is documented not to throw an exception. If you want to port the printing API to Xbox, how do you do it in a way that allows existing desktop apps to continue to run on Xbox? The inert behavior is completely truthful: There are no printers on an Xbox. Nobody expects the answer to the question, “How many printers are there?” to be “How dare you ask me such a thing!”

If he just used the words "existing desktop apps" in the second paragraph of the article instead of the second to last, I don't think people would be reacting so negatively. Instead, when he talks about avoiding "gaslighting" by returning an invalid pointer by just gaslighting in a different way by lying about the error that occurred, it almost sounds unhinged.

Umm but you can’t find a current version of Word that actually does that. Try it sometime.

Here's a rather large (5MB) vintage 1996 Microsoft Word document: https://archive.org/download/cd-pn-0527a/CD_ROM.ISO/APPENDIX...

That file opens and appears to render just fine for me in Word 2016.

This has been my experience w/ Office files in general. Old files open and render very well in newer versions.

The point made above was "opens exactly as expected". So, does it look like the authors intended in 1996? I doubt it.

If you "doubt" it, please provide a specific example of what you believe is inaccurate in the document rendering.

As it happens, we just had this discussion regarding a Word document from 1990: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39357709

Quote from the article:

"Converting this document from its original format was a bit of a victory for open source software. And a lesson in how hard document preservation is."

So, opening this document was hard and that it finally worked was not because of Microsoft's alleged famous backwards compatibility- which is a myth in my book.

I doubt it because, as I said, Word did not even render the document the same on two different installations back in the day. Contrary to LaTeX, there is really no way to know what "opens on your computer exactly as expected" even means. We do not know what the original author intended it to look like, because we do not know how the document looked like to them.

As long as there is no retroactive interpretation, like it happened with RGB, for example, the "doubt it" will stand.

Just flipping thru it I'm not seeing obvious issues. In terms of being usable for reference I think it's reasonable. The diagrams and tables look intelligible and not garbled. Layout isn't visible screwed-up.

Will it be a 1-to-1 with printed output from 1996? Probably not.

“exactly as expected” is a much higher bar to clear then roughly as expected.

Was able to do it just fine with these government files[0,1] I found on Google. Word version 16.82 on Mac (Apple Silicon too).

0: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/Legis/LI/uconsCheck.cfm....

1: https://archive.ada.gov/briefs/andersbr.doc

The point made above was "opens exactly as expected". So, does it look like the authors intended in 1996? I doubt it.

I assume the negative reactions are due to the large Apple user base on HN. Most of these people are likely so used to being told "this software was built for a version of your OS released 2 years ago so you can't use it anymore, tough shit", they've come to expect it.

nah, it's because all of this is just lip service. windows11 is getting worse and worse.

and cool that Mr Chen thinks about UX and compatibility, but MS as whole does not really. important business apps got special treatment, and that's it. (MS and its corporate entourage solved this mostly by providing Windows and "security" patches for it, for a lot of money.)

You just created a scenario in your head that confirmed an existing bias in your head and then assumed that your made up scenario matched reality. Very weird to read.

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