Brian Jones ‘Confesses’ to Office HTML Format ‘Guilt’

Much respect for Brian Jones, his article “Some background information on the reasons we have moved to an XML format as the default in Office ‘12’,” is the first detailed ‘confession’ from a Microsoft employee about why their Office HTML formats miss the mark. What many interpret as a deliberate attempt to avoid exporting to W3C-compliant HTML was really a misplaced design goal. Brian writes:

Our scenario was that people would start saving “docs” as HTML on their intranet sites and browse them with the browser. We viewed the browser as “electronic paper” that we had to “print” to (i.e. perfect fidelity). We had already got a lot of feedback from our Word97 Internet Assistant add-in that any loss of fidelity when saving as a web page was unacceptable and a “bug”. As it turned out, this usage scenario did not become as common as we thought it would and a zillion conspiracy theories formed about why we “really” did it. Many people assumed that a better approach would have been to save as “clean” HTML even if the result did not look exactly like what the user saw on the screen. We felt that the core office applications (other than FrontPage) were not really meant to be web page authoring tools, so we focused on converting docs to exact replicas in HTML. We didn’t want people losing any functionality when saving to HTML so we had to figure out a way to store everything that could have existed in a binary document as HTML. We thought we were clever creating a bunch of "mso-" CSS properties that allowed us to roundtrip everything.

This is an excellent example of Microsoft’s fundamental misunderstanding of the Internet during the 1990s. It is a fine specimen highlighting the character of that misunderstanding. When you try to use SQL Server 2000 or Internet Information Server 5.x through an Internet hosting service, you should find a similar misunderstanding. Brian Jones has clarified Microsoft’s position on Office HTML formats: these formats were designed to “roundtrip” instead of to export. Locking me into a roundtrip scenario was interpreted by me as a “conspiratorial” trap. (What is important to mention is that it is still a trap whether Brian and his team are innocent of conspiracy or not—ignorance and malice often have the same effect.)

The positive side of this confession is that this failure to understand HTML can be put behind them. I do not see them failing to understand XML—and this will prove to be more important.

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