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Text of the page (random words):
les update the sector allocation tables update the directory entries update summary information flush everything to disk these weren t atomic operations so it was super easy in an era when computers constantly crashed or had problems to end up in a situation where some structures were updated and others weren t compared to like a txt file where you would either get the old version or a truncated new version you might lose content but you almost never ended up with an unreadable file with doc as someone doing like helpdesk it you constantly ended up with people that had just corrupted unreadable files and here s the part that really twisted the knife the longer you worked on the same file the more important that file likely was but word didn t clean up after itself as a doc accumulated images tracked changes and revision history the internal structure grew more complex and the file got larger but even when you deleted content from the document the data wasn t actually removed from the file it was marked as free space internally but left sitting there like furniture you moved to the curb that nobody ever picked up the file bloated the internal fragmentation worsened and the probability of corruption increased in direct proportion to how much you cared about the contents users had to be trained both to save the file often as autorecover wasn t reliable enough and to periodically save as a new file to force word to write a clean version from scratch this was the digital equivalent of being told that your car works fine you just need to rebuild the engine every 500 miles as routine maintenance the end result was that microsoft word quickly developed a reputation among technical people as horrible to work with not because it was a bad word processor it was actually quite good at the word processing part but because when a user showed up at the help desk with tears in their eyes the tools i had to help them were mostly useless i could scan the raw file for text patterns which often pulled out the content but without formatting it wasn t really a recovered file it was more like finding your belongings scattered across a field after a tornado technically your stuff but not in any useful arrangement sometimes you could rebuild the fat or try alternative directory entries to recover slightly older versions but in general if the doc encountered a structural error the thing was toast and your work was gone forever this led to a never ending series of helpdesk sessions where i had to explain to people that yes i understood they had worked on this file for months but it was gone and nobody could help them i became a grief counselor who happened to know about filesystems thankfully people quickly learned to obsessively copy their files to multiple locations with different names thesis_final doc thesis_final_v2 doc thesis_final_final_real doc but this required getting burned at least once which is sort of like saying you learned your car s brakes didn t work by driving into a bus enter the xml revolution so around 2007 we see the shift from doc to docx which introduces a lot of hard lessons from the problems of doc first it s just a bundle specifically a zip archive my_document docx renamed to zip content_types xml _rels rels word document xml the actual text content styles xml formatting styles fonttable xml settings xml media image1 png embedded images image2 jpg docprops app xml core xml metadata now in theory this is great your content is human readable xml your images are just image files if something goes wrong you can rename the file to zip extract it and at least recover your text by opening document xml in notepad the days of staring at an opaque binary blob and praying were supposed to be over however in practice something terrible happened microsoft somehow managed to produce the worst xml to ever exist in human history let me lay down the scope of this complexity because i have never seen anything like it in my life here is the standards website for ecma 376 now you know you are in trouble when you see a 4 part download that looks like the following part 1 fundamentals and markup language reference 5th edition december 2016 part 2 open packaging conventions 5th edition december 2021 part 3 markup compatibility and extensibility 5th edition december 2015 part 4 transitional migration features 5th edition december 2016 if you download part 1 you are given the following now if you open that pdf get ready for it it s a 5039 page pdf i have never conceived of something this complicated it s also functionally unreadable and i say this as someone who has on multiple occasions in his life read a car repair manual cover to cover because i didn t have anything else to do i once read the haynes manual for a 1994 honda civic like it was a beach novel this is not that this is what happens when a standards committee gets a catering budget and no deadline some light reading before bed there was an accusation at the time that microsoft was making ooxml deliberately more complicated than it needed to be that the goal was to claim it was an open standard while making the standard so incomprehensibly vast that it would take a heroic effort for anyone else to implement it i think this is unquestionably true libreoffice has a great blog post on it that includes this striking comparison the difference in complexity between the document xml and content xml files is striking when you compare their lengths the content xml file has 6 802 lines while the document xml file has 60 245 lines compared to a text document of 5 566 lines so the difference between odf format and the ooxml format results in a exponentially less complicated xml file either you could do the incredible amount of work to become compatible with this nightmarish specification or you could effectively find yourself cut out of the entire word processing ecosystem now without question this was done by microsoft in order to have their cake and eat it too they would be able to tell regulators and customers that this wasn t a proprietary format and that nobody was locked into the microsoft office ecosystem for the production of documents which had started to become a concern among non us countries that now all of their government documents and records were effectively locked into using microsoft however the somewhat ironic thing is it ended up not mattering that much because soon the only desktop application that would matter is the browser rise of markdown the file formats of word processors were their own problems but more fundamentally the nature of how people consumed content was changing desktop based applications became less and less important post 2010 and users got increasingly more frustrated with the incredibly clunky way of working with microsoft word and all traditional files with emailing them back and forth endlessly or working with file shares so while docx was a superior format from the perspective of opening the file and it becoming corrupted it also was fundamentally incompatible with the smartphone era even though you could open these files soon the expectation was that whatever content you wanted people to consume should be viewable through a browser as working for a software company went from being a niche profession to being something that seemingly everyone you met did the defacto platform for issues tracking progress discussions etc moved to github this was where i and many others first encountered markdown and started using it on a regular basis john gruber co creator of markdown has a great breakdown of standard markdown and then there are specific flavors that have branched off over time you can see that here the important part though is it lets you very quickly generate webpages that work on every browser on the planet with almost no memorization and for the most part the same thing works in github on slack in confluence etc you no longer had to ponder whether the person you were sending to had the right license to see the thing you were writing in the correct format this combined with the rise of google workspace with google docs slides etc meant your technical staff were having conversations through markdown pages and your less technical staff were operating entirely in the cloud google was better than microsoft at the sort of stuff word had always been used for which is tracking revisions handling feedback sharing securely etc it had a small subset of the total features but as we all learned nobody knew about the more advanced features of word anyway by 2015 the writing was on the wall companies stopped giving me an office license by default switching them to you can request a license this to anyone who has ever worked for a large company is the kiss of death if i cannot be certain that you can successfully open the file i m working on there is absolutely no point in writing it inside of that platform combine that with the corporate death of email and replacing it with slack teams the entire workflow died without a lot of fanfare then with the rise of llms and their use perhaps overuse of markdown we ve reached peak md markdown is the format of our help docs many of our websites are generated exclusively from markdown it s now the most common format that i write anything in this was originally written in markdown inside of vim why it won there s a lot of reasons why i think markdown ended up winning in no small part because it solved a real problem in an easy to understand way writing html is miserable and overkill for most tasks this removed the need to do that and your output was consumable in a universal and highly performant way that required nothing of your users except access to a web browser but i also think it demonstrates an interesting lesson about formats doc and docx along with odf are pretty highly specialized things designed to handle the complexity of what modern word processing can do libreoffice lets you do some pretty incredible things that cover a huge range of possible needs markdown doesn t do most of what those formats do you can t set margins you can t do columns you can t embed a pivot table or track changes or add a watermark that says draft across every page in 45 degree gray calibri markdown doesn t even have a native way to change the font color and none of that mattered because it turns out most writing isn t about any of those things most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense and then getting those words in front of other people markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created you can learn it in ten minutes write it in any text editor on any device read the source file without rendering it diff it in version control and convert it to virtually any output format the files are plain text they will outlive every application that currently renders them they don t belong to any company they can t become corrupted in any meaningful way the worst thing that can happen to a markdown file is you lose some characters and even then the rest of the file is fine after decades of nursing doc files like they were delicate flowers that you had to transport home strapped to your car roof the idea of a format that simply cannot structurally fail is not just convenient it s a kind of liberation i think about this sometimes when i m writing in vim at midnight just me and a blinking cursor and a plain text file that will still be readable when i m dead no filesystem within a filesystem no sector allocation tables no 5 039 page specification just words a few hash marks and never having to think about it again share on mastodon update to the ghost theme that powers this site march 10 2026 1 min read i added a few modifications to the oss ghost theme that powers this site you can get it here https gitlab com matdevdug minimal ghost theme added better image caption support added the cool mastodon feature outlined here to attribute posts from your site back to your mastodon username by following the instructions here i tried to make it pretty easy to customize but if you need something changed feel free to open an issue on the repo thanks for all the feedback share on mastodon boy i was wrong about the fediverse march 06 2026 5 min read in fediverse i have never been an online community first person the internet is how i stay in touch with people i met in real life i m not a tweet comments at celebrities guy i was never funny enough to be the funniest person on twitter so when twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine i moved to mastodon mostly because it seemed to be twitter without the bullshit no recommended for you feed no ads it was broken in a way i find charming of course search was broken because all oss social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality in a nightmare world full of constant change it s good to have a few constants to hold on to a lot of the narrative at the time was this is our flag in the ground in the fight against the man it wasn t clear in this context if they meant corporations or the media or the weird pseudo celebrity that had taken over social media where people would breathlessly tell me about shit like chris chan and logan paul bought a pokemon card we all need pointless hobbies but i care about youtube stars like i care about distant stars dying it s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don t talk to me i mostly use social media as a place to waste time not a platform to form para social relationships to narcissists i prefer my narcissism farm to table i d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a twitch star anyway i watched mostly apathetically as the internet tried to rally itself to another cause i read my news at the normal newspapers watched my normal television and put social media off into its own silo then trump effectively shut down the entire free press in the us in a series of bullshit lawsuits see i had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism to thrive in capitalism one must be amoral now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value either you accept a lower share price and don t commit atrocities or you become evil there is no third option so of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs actual businesses why fight a defamation suit when you can settle it by running favorable coverage and maybe bankrupting the media outlet you bought as a stocking stuffer suddenly i couldn t find any reliable reporting about anything in the us my beloved washington post became straight up propaganda and desperate attempts to cope best winter stews to make while you watch your neighbors get kidnapped at gunpoint twelve dollars a month for that threads was worthless because it s the most boring social media website ever imagined it s a social media network designed by brands for brands like if someone made a cable ...