A normal programmer would conclude that Office’s binary file formats:
* are deliberately obfuscated
* are the product of a demented Borg mind
* were created by insanely bad programmers
* and are impossible to read or create correctly.
You’d be wrong on all four counts. With a little bit of digging, I’ll show you how those file formats got so unbelievably complicated, why it doesn’t reflect bad programming on Microsoft’s part, and what you can do to work around it.
Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford provided the anchoring keynote for Yahoo!'s annual internal web-development conference. The subject of the talk is "Quality" -- the processes by which we engineer quality into our software and, of course, the processes by which we often fail to do so...