xkcd #743: Infrastructures

3 years ago by Jakylla to c/xkcd

Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.

Transcript

2003:

[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]

Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we're building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.

2010:

Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they're DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?

[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]

Bearded Fellow: It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.

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Potatos_are_not_friends 162 points 3 years ago

Hot take but PDFs became the primary form of document transfer because Microsoft made .doc, docx, docm, rtf, doc 2003-2020...

All those "It won't open" just forced everyone to say "Fuck it send me the PDF"

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Mic_Check_One_Two 65 points 3 years ago

Pretty much. PDF was specifically designed to retain the same look across any device. The goal was that if you designed a document to look a certain way, that opening it on another device wouldn’t fuck your entire design. That’s also why editing PDFs is so damned frustrating, because they’re designed to not change. It largely started as a frustration with the “move an image 3 pixels to the left, and now all your text is in the wrong place” issue. But the EEE strategy by Microsoft directly contributed to pdf becoming the de facto way to share documents.

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Darkmuch 30 points 3 years ago

My Dad got frustrated with docs as people saw that as an invitation to edit the document, or cut and paste stuff he would write. So he switched to using PDF whenever other people got involved.

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Mic_Check_One_Two 26 points 3 years ago

Yeah, that’s ironically what Microsoft has been moving towards. Collaborative editing is incredible when used properly. But that also means anyone with edit access can mess up your carefully crafted document. Luckily, things like Comments are becoming more commonplace, so people can suggest edits without actually being able to commit them.

It doesn’t solve the copy/pasting issue, but you can copy/paste from PDFs these days anyways. Realistically, even saving it as an image won’t solve that, since most devices can recognize text in images now.

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