Let me start this month's column by apologizing in advance for using it as a forum to rant a bit....OK, a lot. Usually, I can control my irritation when I'm confronted with this situation, but for some reason, my most recent encounter with it really ticked me off.
What has my blood pressure spiking? It is the use of formats other than simple text for tasks where simple text would be the most appropriate choice.
Choosing an inappropriate format is a problem typically borne out of inadequate training or poor product design--circumstances for which we can't really hold the user totally responsible. But sometimes a user's (or a design team's) choice is made out of laziness and total lack of consideration for the people who have to deal with it down the line. It is those situations that have me reaching for a double dose of blood pressure medication and for my keyboard to write this rant. I'm mad as hell about wasted time, bandwidth, and productivity, and I'm not going to take it anymore!
Emotional Outburst
By now, you must be wondering what dramatic event evoked this emotional outburst. To make a long story short, I received a visit from a user who told me that she had received an email message containing an attachment that she couldn't open. Further investigation revealed the offending attachment to be a Microsoft Word document. For some unknown, reason, her browser (she's using SquirrelMail) lost the association between the attachment with an extension of ".doc" and the OpenOffice.org office suite. The quick workaround was to click on the "download" link and bring the file to her desktop, where she could open the file using the standard "open file" dialog. (We fixed the association later.)
What did the Word document contain? Was it some important contract with fill-in fields? No. Was it an instruction manual with lots of pretty pictures? Again, no. This document, which caused so much confusion and aggravation, contained a meeting agenda consisting of six (count 'em--six) short lines of text. No special formatting. No graphics. In fact, there was nothing about it that would justify the bandwidth to turn a 200-character message (at best) into a 17,000 character, MIME-encoded message, not to mention the time we wasted trying to open the thing.
What was the author of this missive thinking? I can easily guess the sequence of events that led up to the delivery of this bloated email. First, he (the author's name was clearly masculine) created the agenda for the upcoming meeting using Microsoft Word and then printed the 30+ copies that he would need to hand out at the meeting. Next, he composed a short email message to the attendees (along the lines of "Here's the agenda"), attached the Word document, and hit the Send button. Satisfied that he can now cross "send meeting agenda" off of his to-do list, he doesn't give it another thought.
If, however, he had taken just a moment longer to cut and paste the agenda from Word directly into the email, then I wouldn't be complaining. In the same amount of time it took him to attach the Word document to his email, he could have cut and pasted its contents, saving my company roughly 10 minutes of time.
While it may appear as though I'm being overly dramatic, consider this: Many of us forward email to our pagers and cell phones. So if a user chooses to send a message using a proprietary format and it ends up on one of our cell phones, she shouldn't complain when we don't respond. We can't even read it! You can never assume that a message's recipient will have the appropriate software available to read an inappropriately formatted message. In addition, I'm sure that all of your users have been properly admonished not to open attachments that they aren't expecting. Thus, while the recipient tries to verify the message's authenticity, the content that is embedded in a binary attachment will not be opened and read. (At least, I'm hoping that the user wouldn't blindly open it!) Such a delay could be fatal (e.g., "Dear John: Your donor heart is now available....").
I teach my users that, when sending email, they should use binary attachments only when they are warranted and only when their content cannot be conveyed in plain text. The text is the message. Fancy formatting is (for the most part) superfluous to the message. (I'll save my rant about the evils of HTML-formatted email for another time.)
Text Is Not Just for Emails
Now that I've vented about non-text email, let me stand back up on my soapbox again, this time to espouse the virtues of text-based configuration files (since I've recently had some unpleasant experiences with some software that kept its configuration in binary files). If you use a UNIX-like system, you're already aware of the virtues of the text configuration files that are stored in the '/etc' directory. If you don't, odds are that at some time you have had to either reload your system because "the registry" (hereinafter referred to as "the abomination") got corrupted or purchase software to let you "clean" or "repair" the abomination. Granted, incidences of abomination corruption have become less frequent as the OS that uses the abomination has improved. But no matter how good that OS becomes, the lack of good ol' text-based configuration files deprives computer professionals of two key advantages:
Text Is Transparent
First, text configuration files are transparent. You don't need some obscure (or potentially expensive) utility to read a file that is text-based. Assuming you have the proper privileges, you can read or write a text-based config file using a simple editor. This is a nice attribute during normal system operations, but it is a godsend should you find yourself booted to some recovery media because of a hardware or software failure. Helping someone debug a failing system is much easier if he can send to you (or post to a newsgroup) his current configuration files. And cloning services between servers is a snap when all you need to do is copy a file, edit it, and then send it to the new server. Oh sure, I know that you can import and export "hives" using specialized tools. (I always thought that hives were some kind of medical condition.) But the ease of importing/exporting hives pales in comparison to what can be done when you can actually read and make sense of the file you're working with. The config files that I have seen always seem to have sufficient, if not copious, documentation concerning each of the parameters and their options, which is something lacking in ".reg" files.
Text Is Scriptable
The second major attribute of text config files (or any text-based files, for that matter) is that they are scriptable. I can easily use any of the plethora of system utilities to create textual config files or to make changes to them. As an example, we recently reconfigured our internal DNS to change domain names. Most of the employees have their Firefox browsers pointing to our intranet as their startup home page. After the domain name change, I wanted to reconfigure their browsers to point to the new home page. Since their roaming profiles are stored on my Samba server, it was a trivial task to write a quick script to find their preferences files and make the change:
| xargs -i sed -i 's/old.domain/new.domain/' {}
I made a similar edit to their bookmarks files as well. All of it was made easy because the developers of the Mozilla and Firefox browsers know the elegance of text for storing this type of information.
Text Leads to Sanity
I feel so much better now. I'm sure all of you know how good it feels to vent your frustrations every once in a while. Fortunately, there are others out there who feel as I do. Readers who also are Java programmers already use text-based configuration files; they're called properties files. If you store your configurations in XML, you're still dealing with text files. They're just a bit more cluttered when viewed with an editor. That the configuration file is "zipped" or "jarred" is of minimal consequence; it just adds a layer of complexity.
Which brings me to the exciting news that has hit all of the technology Web sites: The Massachusetts state government has ordained that all electronic documents "created and saved" by state employees will have to be based on open formats. The open formats blessed by this edict are PDF and OpenDocument, which is XML-based. The switch is scheduled to be fully implemented by January 2007.
As more and more states adopt these formats, I'll be able to exchange documents more easily without resorting to specialized import/export filters. All I will need is a PDF reader and my favorite office suite, OpenOffice.org (which fully supports the OpenDocument format in its upcoming release, V2). Of course, it won't be long before the person who sent the .doc file attachment will be attaching OpenDocument binaries instead, and I'll be back where I started. Here I go again....
Barry L. Kline is a consultant and has been developing software on various DEC and IBM midrange platforms for over 21 years. Barry discovered Linux back in the days when it was necessary to download diskette images and source code from the Internet. Since then, he has installed Linux on hundreds of machines, where it functions as servers and workstations in iSeries and Windows networks. He co-authored the book Understanding Linux Web Hosting with Don Denoncourt. Barry can be reached at
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