Do you sometimes have difficulty talking to your non-technical clients, coworkers, and bosses? Do they continually say things to you that just don’t make any sense? Do they ask for the completely impossible as if they’re ordering a cup of coffee? Do they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of what they’re talking about?
If you answered, yes, to any of these questions, don’t worry—you’re not alone. I have a lot more to say about this. You can read my post in New Relic’s blog here.
What software do you use for formatting a resume, running a presentation, a rudimentary word processor, drawing pictures of their network infrastructure connections, a simple database or drawing a map? By now you have probably guessed: a spreadsheet. (The presentation used a separate worksheet for each slide.)
Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented the lowly electronic spreadsheet with VisiCalc for the Apple II in 1979. It is amazing that it has come to have such a long and fruitful life – and dare we say so abused too. I remember my first time with VisiCalc back then. I thought I had died and gone to digital heaven: it was my go-to mathematical modeling tool, calculator, and general analysis workbench. Looks like many of you have had similar circumstances.
Part of the allure of the spreadsheet is that it can be so useful, even in situations where we have a lot more appropriate software and collaboration tools (such as Quickbase). A good example comes from the early days of Trek bicycles. Their product team would hold status meetings two to three times per week, during which the team assembled in a conference room and via phone would update project spreadsheets one line item at a time. That has got to be one of the most painful ways to collaborate. I guess this was before the Internet was in wide use.
I always knew that spreadsheets were the go-to database program for those who were confounded by SQL or Access or even Filemaker to put in rows of information and organize them. I guess it is a testimonial to the power of the spreadsheet that so many databases were built using them over the years. Here is one that might tickle your, ahem, fancy. A talent agency that books exotic dancers uses a spreadsheet to schedule the dancers and track customer complaints. Customers who are blacklisted (the mind boggles at what the reasons could be to get you on this list) and who require “special skills” of each dancer are also catalogued in separate columns of the spreadsheet. Nice to know.
But databases aren’t their only use or abuse. Just as I was fascinated by those early spreadsheets, many of you have come to use them in more interesting ways. A few years ago I asked my readers on ReadWrite.com to tell me their favorite spreadsheet abuse stories. One reader wrote that he used a spreadsheet’s “formulas to write web page HTML, where I had a lot of data that needed to go in a repeating template.” Again, that seems excessive to me. Another one wrote in: “One retail store HQ I worked for used it to print price tags for furniture since you could create a consistent layout. The buyers also used it as a word processor since they didn’t know how to use Word.”
That seemed to be a common thread. I remember one colleague back in the early days using it as his only word processor, and putting in an entire line of text in each cell. It made for formatting challenges when it came time to edit this “document,” to be sure.
But spreadsheet abuse doesn’t have to happen, particularly if you use an online tool such as Quickbase or one of its competitors. This adds the collaboration component and extends its usefulness beyond mere rows and columns into something more powerful and sharable. Indeed, many people have built some great pieces of software with online spreadsheets, such as:
For example, one collegiate football team uses their spreadsheet as an application for recruiting high school football players. Scouts use tables to track data for prospects such as height, weight, stats and SAT scores. The information is shared among the front office team management and continually updated as they roam around the country looking for talent. That isn’t spreadsheet abuse, but just darned clever. So think the next time you are about to build the world’s greatest spreadsheet of your own, and maybe start your app with an online version first.
A/B testing is like many things that can be vexing about the Web: a simple concept can turn into a complex programming project. But while the idea is simple — producing two (or more) different webpages for your site and instrument them to see which one drives more traffic or more sales – getting it to work can be fraught with politics and the actual implementation details.
Why bother? Mainly because there is almost nothing else that you can do that can have such a big effect. Just by changing the text size or button color you can generate a 50% increase in click through rates, which is what one of Denmark airports found with their website when they swapped out text that said “Shop Online” to “Buy Tax Free.”
A/B testing isn’t new: magazine publishers have experimented with various cover layouts and images to determine what sells best on newsstands. But it still may be new to your IT department, or your management, and it is high time to get started with the process. Many modern websites still squander their home page real estate, filling up the page with blank spaces or on things users ignore: filler, self-promos and ads. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen recommends to “cut the fluff and spend the pixels on design elements of interest to users — mainly content, but also navigation.”
So we’ve put together some basic tips, and this slideshow showing you what worked in the past for major ecommerce retailers, and some suggestions on potential ways to attack your first testing project.
Your first challenge is all about politics, and who owns which portion of your website that you are trying to improve. “Sometimes a chief marketing officer loses track of what their customers are buying, and having A/B tests reconnects customers with the company,” said Brooks Bell, head of a testing firm that bears her name. (I met her at a trade show earlier in November.) But instead of picking the CMO or another executive, it might be better in the long term to find someone at the bottom of the food chain looking to shine. One of Bell’s earliest projects was such an individual who didn’t have any staff or much budget for testing. As a result of what they found and the bottom-line benefits they produced, “the manager now has a staff of ten and is training other groups within the corporation to do other testing, and was promoted to a director level position that is now very influential and visible within the organization.” So A/B tests can be a way to advance your own career too!
But you also want to be careful that your design is far enough alone where the testing can be useful. User experience expert Danielle Cooley says, “A/B testing is great when you’re trying to determine if a specific detail should be one way or the other, such as should a call to action button be orange or green? But it doesn’t help much early in the design process, or that you still need to have a sensible workflow and solid page design.”
Once you have found your testing champion, your next challenge is purely technical: what kind of testing platform are you going to use and whether you choose someone in-house or a consultant such as Bell, Wingify, Monetate or the dozens of others who ply this trade. You might want to designate a couple of your technical staff and give them a week and the necessary training to get up to speed on the topic, and let them find the right tool for their work. Keep in mind that you don’t just want a coder: you want to build a longer-lasting team to conduct and interpret the tests. “You need lots of talented people to be able to ask the right questions and interpret the insights from the data that you collect, [along with] skilled analysts and marketing people to fully realize your changes,” said Bell. “We typically use a war room where we have all the stakeholders present and brainstorm on the best strategies.”
But if you do look outside, most of the consultants have pretty convincing stories about the amount of dough they have saved their clients over the years or the power of their approaches, so it can be hard to evaluate them.
Finally, you have to keep it going. Testing is a process, not a destination. One part of the challenge with testing is being able to scale your testing effort up as word gets out around the company about your results. Another is that the best IT shops know that they have to frequently make changes to their sites to stay fresh and appeal to new eyeballs. No one is better than this than Intuit, makers of QuickBooks.
Matthew Heusser, Managing Principal for Excelon Development saw when he visited their offices how two interface designs are rolled out for a month and statistics are gathered to decide on which one is ultimately deployed. These tests have helped Intuit weather numerous changes over the years to keep their product fresh. As he writes, “The amazing thing about Intuit is that it has already survived three major market shifts, from DOS to Windows, Windows to the Web, and now the conversion to Social/Mobile products.” That is a lot of history.
Here are some final words of wisdom from Bell: “There is always something that an A/B test misses, even with the best of intentions and careful planning. So if get stuck, think about redoing your tests with a different segmentation of your audience, or with a different focus. There is no single best testing option. Just because you can measure something in a test doesn’t mean you should do it. Think more strategically and long-term, and make sure your executives ultimately support what tests you are doing.”
There are dozens of A/B consultants, tools, and compendiums of tips and tricks. Here are a few links to check out:
— Robin Johnson, writing earlier this year in Optimizely, gives you 71 different ideas on things to test, including website copy, visual elements, and just plain common sense things such as whether you have a positive or negative spin on what you are trying to sell.
— Uri Bar-Joseph, writing in SearchEngineWatch, has eight rules for A/B testing, including focusing on one variable, choosing your groups randomly and measuring the results carefully.
–And if you want to have some fun with A/B tests of the past, take a look at these 12 results that were somewhat counter-intuitive from WhichTestWon.com, a commercial A/B testing provider.
At the 2013 Strangeloop tech conference in St. Louis, several women presenters gave important lessons that we all can use on how to become better coders. The conference had dozens of sessions on advanced programming languages along with tutorials given by some of the leading open source authors from around the world. Notable female speakers at the show included Jenny Finkel, one of the founders of Prismatic; Sarah Dutkiewicz, the owner of Cleveland Tech Consulting LLC; Jen Myers, the founder of the Chicago chapter of GirlDevelopIT.com and Parisa Tabriz, who runs the Chrome browser security team at Google. There was a lot that all of us could learn from their talks.
Some points these various speakers made during the two-day conference:
Find a mentor that you can collaborate with. Most of the time when you hear advice about finding a mentor, you think the relationship is mostly one way: the mentor imparting wisdom to the mentee. But Dutkiewicz gave lots of great examples of how both parties learn from and inspire each other in more of a symbiotic relationship. She mentions Ada Lovelace, widely considered the first computer programmer, who worked closely with Charles Babbage on his Difference Engine in the 1840s and how both profited from the relationship.
Always be documenting your code. Lovelace also was the first to document her algorithms and this is a common theme throughout history where many female nerds were also helpful here. Dutkiewicz spoke about several women who were involved in the early ENIAC project in the 1940s, the first digital general-purpose computers that filled an entire room. The team had a major role in the project and included Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. They were responsible for documenting the programming used in the machine, including some of the main core programs. “These women began their careers by doing complex mathematical calculations of ballistic trajectories and were heavily involved in early Fortran and COBOL standards efforts,” said Dutkiewicz during her speech.
Role models count. Many women and minorities played important role models to inspire future generations of techies. Myers mentioned in her talk the role played by Nichelle Nichols, the actress who is better known as Lt. Uhura on the original 1960s-era Star Trek TV shows. While Myers reminded her audience “Star Trek isn’t real” (accompanied to many groans), Nichols had the first interracial on-screen kiss. She found out that she had a big fan in Dr. Martin Luther King, as she relates in this video clip where he tells her that Star Trek was the only TV show that he allowed his kids to watch:
You can’t be what you can’t see. One of Myers’ role models is the first American female astronaut Sally Ride, to whom she attributes this quote: “Young girls need to see role models in whatever career they choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday.” Besides encouraging other women to choose technical careers, looking for role models is also a good way to widen your horizons and challenging the status quo, whatever it might be. Dutkiewicz mentioned this in her talk and pointed to Admiral Grace Hopper who also wasn’t afraid to challenge the existing predominantly male military at the time. Hopper of course went on to make many contributions to computer science, including building the first compiler and the beginnings of COBOL Hopper served as a goodwill ambassador in her later years, lecturing to many audiences and inspiring many women to enter tech fields.
Keep an open mind about your career. Dutkiewicz mentioned another aspect of challenging the status quo is being open-minded about where your career will take you. Many of us have come to technical fields from some rather odd and non-technical places. Myers spoke about the science fiction author Ray Bradbury who said, “We need this thing that makes us sit bolt upright when we are nine or ten [years old] and say, ‘I want to go out and devour the world, I want to do these things.'” Myers also mentioned how her programming classes are geared towards teaching her students how to learn about learning new things because the pace of innovation in software is too fast to keep courseware current. “I want to develop a bunch of world class beginners,” she said at her talk.
Don’t be embarrassed about bugs. Tabriz spoke about Google’s efforts, along with many other contributors from around the world, to track down and eliminate browser bugs in Chrome. Everyone’s code has them, and it is time we all accepted that fact. Over the years, Google has increased its bounty paid to documented bugs, including running a series of programming contests called Pwnium. One of the entrants is a teenaged programmer who has won $60,000 in two separate contests and who goes by the handle Pinkie Pie.
Finally, human growth is not a zero sum game: you need grow both intellectually and socially. Myers uses the example of the movie “The Social Network” where the Mark Zuckerberg character is quite a social misfit (she used a somewhat more pejorative word). “He is so smart that it doesn’t matter how he acts towards others, but that doesn’t have to be that way in real life.” She calls the movie the “Citizen Kane of programming movies,” and urges coders to look at all aspects of their lives, both professional and personal. Good words to live by, to be sure.
Geofencing is the concept of restricting the location of your customers and potential customers by their location, so you can better target promotions and fine-tune your marketing. Over the past several years a number of new companies have been created to take advantage of it and produce smartphone applications, digital coupons, and manage your social media marketing campaigns with an eye to the neighborhood around a particular retail establishment.
“With low-cost developer’s tools becoming available, geofencing is finally coming out of the shadows, moving beyond traditional location-based applications, to form the backbone of a host of new applications and services,” say analysts at ABI Research in a report published in February. They claim it will become a $300 million business by 2017.
Solution providers can build geofences for their retail clients, but it isn’t going to be easy: there are a confusing array of app providers, methods, and tools to use. Here are a few questions to address before you start your first project.
“To really be effective, the business needs to leverage more understanding than just the patch of Earth the customer currently occupies, says Corey Gault, Director of Communications of Portland, Oregon-based Urban Airship. “If I know you are a fan of wines or certain seafoods, I could make that message much more compelling by informing you of new fresh inventory. That turns an annoying interruption into a welcome invitation to engage with my business because it considers your preferences.”
Each project is different, other than using geofencing to focus on a particular local area.
Once you have a notion of what you are trying to build, look for particular technology providers in that area. You can start by looking through the long list of vendors that came to last year’s Local Advertising Conference here. Don’t be surprised if most of these are vendors that are unknown to you: that is the nature of this business.
Another way to come at the core technology providers is to first look at the broad category – social media management, coupon creation, local messaging, social check-in – and then see how many of them actually support any kind of geo-location features. This can quickly narrow the field of potential providers.
As you can see, this is still very much an emerging market, despite all the hoopla over Foursquare and Loopt several years ago. But it clearly is the wave of the future.
Alpha Five is a powerful database and Web applications server and development environment that has been around for many years and continues to get more powerful but not at the expense of ease of use.
We tested Alpha 5 v10 on a Windows XP running SP2 in February 2010.
There are numerous tutorials, along with documentation, copious code examples and videos:
Alpha Five v10
http://alphasoftware.com/products/v10/
70 Blanchard Road,
Burlington, MA 01803
781.229.4500
Prices: Developer $349
Application Server $599, both for $799
Unlimited Runtime licenses $599
Windows XP or later required with at least IE v7 or Firefox 3.0
I had an opportunity to audit a computer science class this week at Washington University, a class that was teaching students how to write iPhone apps. It was their final presentation, and I got to see a dozen apps that were very impressive. As I was watching the kids present, I was thinking back to my college days and the similarities and differences about my education.
(The class is still being taught in 2024.)
Of course, back in my day real programmers wrote in Assembler, and maybe Fortran. None of this object-oriented stuff had even been invented. We also had punched cards, which is probably why I never became a programmer. In grad school, we had video terminals because PCs were still being tinkered around inside Silicon Valley garages.
In the Wash U class, most of the students had their own Macbooks, some better than my own. Each was given an iPod touch to use during the semester and this session was the moment of truth, where they had to demo their apps in front of the class. Most of the programming projects were functional, although there were a few students that had obviously been putting some long hours trying to get the bugs out of their apps. One of the kids was working on his presentation and actually debugged his app during class. Some things never change.
I was impressed first of all with the apps, which ranged from tracking what is in your fridge to being used by a personal trainer to track their clients’ workouts to locating friends on a campus map during free times. There was an app that taught people how to count cards at Blackjack –this could have helped one of my dorm-mates who would periodically make a run to Tahoe where they still used single decks and come home with enough money to pay for his living expenses. Another was used to collate and tag photos from Flickr. Each team had to research and find an app to build that wasn’t yet sold on the App Store, too.
I hope the kids take the time to finish them and post them to the App Store. Some of the apps were very polished and could probably be used as is with almost no additional effort, while a few just crashed with the slightest tap on the screen. I was also impressed with the quality of the presentations and how polished the kids were in front of the class. This isn’t what I remember of my nerdy classmates back in the day, where we seldom even spoke to each other, let alone spoke Powerpoint. Most of the kids put together a few slides that showed their decision-making and progress during the class. Some of the apps were built in teams, some solo. There were about 25 kids in the class, with two women. (This is about the same sad gender ratio in my day, too.)
These were not beginning computer science students by any means. Each of them had to have an understanding of a lot of different pieces, including the graphics interface of the iPhone itself, database calls, Web services, and the Apple development environment that is used to build the app itself. That is a lot for any programmer to handle, but the kids took it in stride. You could tell that they learned a lot during the semester, and were proud of it too. Heck, I was proud of them and I didn’t even know them.
One of the things that I was struck with during the class was how collaborative the kids were. This wasn’t the introverted nerds of my misspent youth — these kids were calling out suggestions to help each other and try to remove the remaining roadblocks in each other’s apps. Some of them had tried to go down a particular path with one tool, only to change horses and use something else. It was fun to watch them get all excited about some arcane code fragment. Part of this I think was because the iPhone environment is so new and so contained that it makes it easier to collaborate, because there are so many things to learn that are outside the normal coding process.
They also learned first-hand about feature creep and trying to hit their requirements on time and how to balance making things work with making things look pretty.
Speaking of which, most of the students had high standards for the look and feel of their apps. There isn’t much screen real estate on the iPhone to fool around with, and you have to make every pixel count. Some of the kids took the time to find the right icons to display on screen, and they all took pains to make use of the various menus and screen controls that make the iPhone apps easy to use with one or two fingers. That was impressive, and showed me that the iPhone really has a future and why 100,000 plus apps have been already created.
You could also see the beginnings of professional computer scientists here too. A few of them mentioned how they coded in pairs, using extreme programming techniques. I think that meant that the pair stayed up all night to meet a particular deadline, but still, that is how it happens in the real world too. And learning object-oriented languages is part and parcel to today’s programming world, unlike the world that I entered after college.
One kid had the funniest line, talking about his mother, who is a project manager and a programmer. “My mom is very old school and knew all these Unix shell script commands that she never told me about when I was growing up.” Oh, youth is so wasted on the young!
If your local university offers a class on iPhone apps, you might want to stop by and be inspired. I know I was. Thanks to the teacher Todd Sproull for letting me sit in.
Symantec’s Altiris Workflow Solution v 6.0 is a series of products that were acquired from LogicBase called TLogic. Used together, they can help you automate virtually any IT process or workflow and imbed business logic into the processes too. The product can be useful for something that requires repetitive human interaction, such as designed an automated system for gambler’s comp packages at a casino to keeping track of cleaned rooms at a hospital. Almost any type of process or Workflow can be automated with Workflow Solution.
We tested the product in August 2008 on a prebuilt virtual machine that was supplied by Symantec.
AltirisSalesInfo@symantec.com, 888-252-5551
http://www.symantec.com
Requirements: Windows Server 2003 or later. Symantec’s Altiris Notification Server and several other Altiris SDK and developer tools (free)
Price: $25,000 for server and designer, additional designer licenses are $4,000 each
Category: Workflow management
Pros: Sophisticated models can be built with little programming expertise
Cons: There are a lot of moving parts to assemble before you can begin working
Servoy Developer is a Java enterprise rapid applications development environment. I have always thought of Java as write once and debug everywhere, but the Servoy tools are changing that with the ability to develop a single code base that can be deployed across Windows, Mac, Linux, and run in a wide variety of browsers too.
Next, download the Servoy .JAR package or use the EXE if you are running Vista. One nice thing is this is free and a fully functioning version with up to five licensed clients, what they call their community edition. It includes the application server, support for Eclipse. and a lightweight Web server too.
Servoy Developer v. 4.0
Pricing details: $895 plus $349 per concurrent client
Product category: Java app development enviroment
Servoy USA, 299 W. Hillcrest Drive Suite 115, Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
(805) 624-4959, http://www.servoy.com
Summary: Servoy has a lot to offer Java developers and a nice way to deploy multiuser Web 2.0 applications from a single code base.
Pros:
• All open source tools and methods here.
• A very rich visual programming environment that can quickly build apps.
Cons: There is a lot to get used to and the user interface is a bit hard to navigate.
General 4.0 Resources – Flash Movies, PDF Files, Reviewer Guide
http://www.servoy.com/generic.jsp?mt=396&taxonomy_id=790
With all due respect to Tim Bray’s recent analysis of IE 5’s use of XML, I think he is missing the point. Microsoft’s entry into the XML universe will do lot more harm than good initially for the XML standards effort, and has the ultimate intention of replacing the way most of us create and exchange documents.
First off, Tim looked at whether Microsoft version of XML (for brevity, let’s call it MS-XML) implements the standards appropriately and within certain parameters. That is fine but not really newsworthy to hear that MS-XML has bugs and wants to do things somewhat differently than the current standards.
The real news is how MS-XML is designed from the beginning to be the common file interchange format for all Microsoft Office 2000 applications. In doing this, Microsoft has taken to extreme its time-honored notion of embrace and extend an ongoing standards effort. This time, MS-XML has something other than XML in mind. Microsoft is trying to move people away from ordinary HTML v3 documents and make Office 2000 the standard tool for web authoring. And while earlier efforts, Front Page most memorable, haven’t really caught on, I think this time Office 2000 has a solid chance.
Let me explain. Up to a few years ago, I received non-Microsoft Office documents in the mail from my correspondents. Now it is rare that I get that errant Word Perfect or Lotus 1-2-3 file: indeed, when I do I often castigate my correspondents and tell them to send me their Microsoft equivalents. This isn’t because I love Microsoft products: it is because that is what the world uses. Remember revisable-form text? Gone. Remember non-PowerPoint presentations? All but extinct. Microsoft Office is the default document interchange standard today.
But to make interchange workable, we still have one remaining issue and that is version control. When Office 97 came out, many people were still running Office 95 or earlier versions and couldn’t read the newer document formats. Of course, this encourages people to upgrade when just a few start sending out the newer formatted documents, but for corporations that want to exchange information easily, it is a painful upgrade. Far better to use a standards-based format, and here MS-XML is perfect for this purpose.
While it is wonderful that Microsoft has decided to support XML in its browser, the bigger news is what it has done with XML in the rest of Office 2000 components, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
A disclaimer: I am by no means adept at XML. I can write very rudimentary HTML code for maintaining my own web site, and my programming days are long since over. But perhaps this is why I am so sensitive when it comes time to evaluate MS-XML. My bottom line: I can’t read MS-XML pages and am too old to start learning how.
So let’s examine the code produced by Word 2000 for a couple of simple examples. For these tests, I am running Beta 9.0.2216 on Windows 98. I wrote a one-page document with the single line “Hello World” and saved it to an HML formatted file. When I view the source, I have a rather lengthy page of text. The header of the page includes all sorts of font metric definitions and meta tags and file information. The first few lines look like this:
<html xmlns:v=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml”
xmlns:o=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office”
xmlns:w=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word” xmlns=”-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN”>
But the really interesting part is the body copy, which looks like this:
<body lang=EN-US style=’tab-interval:.5in’>
<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style=’text-align:center’><b style=’mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal’><span style=’font-size:20.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;color:#3366FF’>Hello
World!<o:p/></span></b></p>
You’ll notice that our font size (20 point), font color, justification (centered) and bold text is all preserved with this code fragment. The reference to the class “MsoNormal” is defined in the style section earlier as Times New Roman, which is what I used in my Word document.
All of this makes it easier to exchange my Word 2000 document with someone else. They can see the style and layout of my text, something that HTML hasn’t been very good at doing since day one.
While this isn’t a review of the product, let me touch on one other feature in Word 2000 that makes it easier for web authors. When you go to save your document, you can save it directly to your web site via FTP. Once you enter the URL, username and password, the FTP site appears on your local directory tree as just another location. That is very nice.
But the side effect is that I have to make a pact with the devil. Once I go down the route of saving my pages as MS-XML, the naked code may become unreadable to me. The pages also take up more room and thus will take a bit longer to download and view. As I said, I am not a XML programmer, or even any kind of programmer. I have purposely kept my web pages sparse and relatively devoid of “advanced” features, in the name of being browser agnostic and universally viewed. I fear that the more people use Word 2000, the more that MS-XML will replace ordinary HTML code on the web.
What about PowerPoint 2000? Earlier versions of PowerPoint had the ability to publish to the web. While simple to use, this produced rather clunky code and a long series of files. The new and XML-ized version produces a single “pointer file” which contains this code enumerating the other files in a separate directory that comprise your PowerPoint slide show. Here are the contents for filelist.xml for our single slide presentation:
<xml xmlns:o=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office”>
<o:File HRef=”master03.htm”/>
<o:File HRef=”master03.xml”/>
<o:File HRef=”preview.wmf”/>
<o:File HRef=”pres.xml”/>
<o:File HRef=”slide0001.htm”/>
<o:File HRef=”master03_stylesheet.css”/>
<o:MainFile HRef=”../Hello Worldppt.htm”/>
<o:File HRef=”error.htm”/>
<o:File HRef=”script.js”/>
<o:File HRef=”filelist.xml”/>
</xml>
Why so many files? Each is essentially a style sheet for different purposes: one for all the XML-capable browsers (guess who?), one not, one that uses CSS, one that uses Javascript. Slide0001.htm is where you’ll find the actual content for our presentation. And “Hello Worldppt.htm” is the control code for the whole show: you’ll see a small Visual Basic program that determines which browser you are running and what you get to see.
if ( msie >= 0 )
ver = parseFloat( appVer.substring( msie+5, appVer.indexOf ( “;”, msie ) ) );
else
ver = parseInt( appVer );
path = “./Hello%20Worldppt_files/error.htm”;
if( (ver < 4) || (msie <= 0) )
{
if ( !msieWin31 && ( ( msie >= 0 && ver >= 3.02 ) || ( msie < 0 && ver >= 3 ) ) )
window.location.replace( path );
else
window.location.href = path;
}
else
window.location.replace( ‘./Hello%20Worldppt_files/slide0001.htm’+document.location.hash );
Again, this has the effect of making it easy to publish your work to the web and exchange it with others.
If you buy into my explanation, the whole idea of suing Microsoft for putting IE into the operating system becomes really a minor sideshow. With Office 2000, something bigger is at stake, to capture all the current non-MS Office users, those few hardy holdouts who use Lotus and Corel tools to create their documents, spreadsheets and presentations. And while they are at it, Microsoft also wants to capture those others who use non-MS tools for writing web pages. The underlying effort is to be the single document interchange vendor for everyone, even those folks who don’t run some form of Windows on their desktop. And MS-XML will be the Trojan Horse to pull this off. Taken in this context, whether Microsoft supports or doesn’t support the overall XML standards effort isn’t that important anymore. Because soon more people will be writing MS-XML documents than anything else, and then MS-XML will become >the< standard.