Jeremiah Cornelius writes “Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. ‘Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates… to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer — …should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they’re fundamentally incompatible… Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.’ Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?”… Jeremiah Cornelius writes “Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. ‘Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates… to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer — …should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they’re fundamentally incompatible… Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.’ Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?”

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