Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
.NET and OLE
Author: Nick Sweeney Posted: 6/26/2000; 6:38:16 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 6/25/2000 Msg #: 18091 (In response to 18062) Prev/Next: 18090 / 18092
The .NET announcement reminded me of a recent Slashdot story on the attempts to reverse-engineer the DOC format. One comment seemed particularly relevant to this week's announcement:
DOC isn't a difficult file format. It's pretty well documented in various places around the web.The thing is DOC is a compound file format. Meaning it is made up of various serialized data streams from embedded components. Word itself won't even know what many parts of a DOC file means, it'll just pass it on to Visio, Excel, Photoshop etc to read and understand.
DOC is a hugely extensible file format, and you can't support everything DOC can cause DOC can theorectically support just about anything...especially windows applications.
Now, to my amateur's eye, .NET seems like an extension of the OLE principle to the web platform, but with the advantage that it uses SOAP as the "glue" for interoperability, rather than COM. But that raises the question of whether the Windows .NET platform (on a user level) is going to be as hard to replicate across other platforms as the Word document format. That's to say that it's fairly straightforward to read simple DOCs elsewhere, but nigh-on impossible to replicate accurately elsewhere because of its reliance upon native Windows APIs.
But having SOAP as the protocol should make the difference, yes?
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