The launch of Microsoft's new interoperability principles have been both cautiously welcomed and sceptically scrutinised as the company goes about convincing the IT industry that it is genuine in its pursuit to provide interoperability with rival products, more consumer choice, less vendor lock-in and greater collaboration with the open source community.
Here, Microsoft Australia CTO Greg Stones gives some obviously polished PR-approved responses to questions from Computerworld regarding the motivations behind support for ODF and PDF, what the software giant is really gaining by providing support to rival formats, and the ambiguities in its Open Specification Promise. He also gives a painfully polished response to CNN's senior editor's claims that the company is trying to eliminate free software.Typical Microsoft PR response to tough questions, but interesting nonetheless....
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-09-21
I can see what the guy is talking about, the site looks like pants on this setup too, it is Vectorlinux running on Firefox 2.
Can you not see his point ? Should I also have to change my default font setup just to accommodate Microsoft, or any other website that assumes they can dictate how I view webpages ?
It looks to me like some muppet designed a webpage in MSWord and saved it to web.
Member since:2006-02-05
Any OS that does not ship with Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Courier automatically fails as a desktop machine. These are not microsoft fonts, they are standards that are used everywhere, and not just for computers. MS should not have to test against the hundreds of alternative operating systems that do not meet the minimum requirements of displaying text.
If it didn't look right without verdana, you would have a point. What you are seeing is a combination of freetypes collosal failure on anything but the simplest of tasks, and the lack of standard fonts on linux.
I'll repeat it again, because even though i thought I was clear in my last post, aparently I wasn't. The only non standard part of the styling of that text is putting verdana as the first choice. There is nothing else microsoft specific, and a system/browser combination that cannot support is not suitable even for viewing office memos, let alone the thousands of permutations that it will run into on the web.
Member since:
2006-02-05
Verdana is an MS font, but Arial and Helvetica are both industry standards. If none are on your machine, it defaults out to however sans-serif is configured on your machine.
A) Suse should include Arial and/or Helvetica, as they are required for any remotely serious work in anything even related to type.
B) Suse should configure its system to use a sans-serif font that doesn't look like complete and total garbage something in between point sizes
The full css rules for the text is
font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size:70%;
line-height:140%;
margin:0px;
padding:0px 0px 1em;
That is very standard stuff, and should both look nice and be readable on any os set up even remotely well. The worst thing you can say is that they put verdana as the first choice on the list, but I don't think that is really worth complaining about.
The reason it looks like ass on your computer is freetype and/or your sans-serif font is dying painfully trying to rendor in between points (as it is set to 70% rather then a specific size) I don't think MS should have to take this into account, it is like complaining that a website sucks because you have a hard time using it as your browser doesn't support images, or javascript, or css.
Edited 2008-06-18 22:19 UTC