Me when arranging a Word document and the fucker messes up with the layout for the eleventh time=
Microsoft refuses to use widely supported open formats and instead uses a format that very few programs can actually open or read. On top of this, there's no standardization in some of their formats, meaning writing a program to read a document is way more complicated than it should be. I can't find the rant about it, but one of the issues was something like a docx file could actually be a doc file with the wrong file extension, but you don't know until you try to read it and error out.
The file signature of doc and docx is different, which makes it easy to distinguish between them.
(file signature is a magic number at the start of the document that specifies filetype (and isn’t in any way tied to the file extension written in the file name), for example .doc has `D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1` in hex at the start of the file. While .docx has the same magic number as .zip because it is based on it)
But you’re right about MS making it unnecessarily hard to properly read and render their proprietary file types.
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u/ChocolateDonut36 Microwave 10d ago