Condescension and rational critique apparently don’t go well together. To respond to your points in order:
- Only “professional typesetters” should dare to get close to such dangerous choices as “font size.”
That’s not even close to what he said; what he said, after acknowledging the need for people to do their own typesetting these days, is that the WYSIWYG word processing model encourages people to fuck around with fonts and type size and other formatting when they should be concentrating on content.
- Unless you bother to learn a markup language for displaying mathematical formulae that, unless you are a publishing academic mathematician or scientist, you will never, ever have occasion to use, you should not be allowed to use any text ouptut format besides ASCII.
Again, not even close to what he said. What he said is that ASCII is better for composing and transmitting digital text, being portable, compact, and less prone to corruption than, say, .doc files.
- Issues from a version of Word released in 1997 that have since been corrected, such as lack of free backwards compatibility, are somehow still worth raising.
As you said, it’s an 11-year-old article. Besides, switching versions of Word still fucks up formatting, and since Word 2007, .docx files have been a pain in the ass for users of earlier versions.
- It’s OK to waste everyone’s time by making them read a poorly thought out rant against the existence of the subhuman class known as “people who do not work in computer science professionally” and then spill, at the end, that this actually isn’t about the ease of use of a program at all, but is another ideological anti-Microsoft rant from doctrinaire open-source zealots who are angry at something being successful.
Don’t know where you got this; Cottrell, while acknowledging his bias, clearly feels that Word isn’t good at what it does, but is succeeding despite its faults because of Microsoft’s market power. And Cottrell isn’t in computer science, he’s an economics professor, albeit a major geek.
I don’t agree with him about all this; I think that Word sucks for entirely different reasons. A two-step process of writing and formatting is perfectly feasible in WYSIYG; although Word does make this difficult with its automated style-based formatting, it can be set up for plain text entry, and I refuse to believe that marking up with TeX is easier than doing it with Word styles.
Nonetheless, I do agree with his main point: Word, regardless of its virtues, does not serve well in providing a standard text format, and it’s entirely due to Microsoft’s leverage with Windows that it has been adopted as such. If you need to transmit text alone, plain text is better. If you need to transmit formatting, an immutable format like PDF is better. When transmitting my résumé to a potential employer, for example, I am usually required to send it as a .doc file. I have a meticulously formatted résumé, and it’s usually fucked up by the version of Word on the receiving end. If they’d let me upload a PDF, they’d see it as it’s meant to be seen.
Also, I’d rather use WordPerfect. But that’s another thing entirely.
