Long stupid debate on OOXML and the year 1900

[Ric Werme]

Ben Scott wrote:
>   If getting rid of of legacy baggage was sufficient motivation for
> everything, we'd all be using Plan 9 instead of Linux, the OSI stack
> instead of IPv4, $LANGUAGE instead of C, Esperanto instead of English,
> and so on and so forth.  (Again, these are examples, they illustrate a
> point, they don't define it, don't nit-pick the examples, address the
> underling point.)

OSI instead of IPv4!?  I thought you didn't like jokes in technical
discussions.  :-)  I spent a week in Santa Monica learning about an OSI stack
by day and reading Rose's _The Open Book_ by night.  I came back confident
that our customers would be buying our OSI support because they had to
but would never run it.

I'm not certain I appreciate the "underling" point.  A spreadsheet described
in XML would seem to me by definition a new file format, so why propagate
ancient history?  Is is general laziness, the magnitude of all the other
crap that ought to be modernized, or that the old files don't have enough
information if the author is relying on the Gregorian calendar or already
worked around the bug?

       -Ric Werme