From page 212 of the XML Bible (Elliotte Rusty Harold) “The DTD (Document Type Definition) establishes a standard for the elements that viewing and editing software must support. Even more importantly, it establishes that extensions beyond those the DTD declares are invalid. Thus, it helps prevent software vendors from embracing and extending open protocols in order to lock users into their proprietary software.”
I remember when “embrace and extend” was a major buzzword. It was a standard component of the following dialog:
“So, company X, what are you going to do about the fact that company Y has just come out with Quality Widget Messaging Format (or QWMF)?”
“Well of course we are going to embrace QWMF and extend it to further meet our customer needs.”
It seems that from Elliotte’s perspective, the person from company X might as well have said:
“Frankly we’re threatened. What we’re going to do here in our own defense is poison the milk. We’ll wrap up QWMF into our own format, with our own windows extension and MIME type, and then add a few features so it looks like we had a reason to do this. Then, we’ll threaten all the tools people to make sure they save to our format and not raw QWMF. It would be awful if company Y increased their market share by taking customers from us. We’ll do everything we can to stop them.”
I think file format wars are one of the biggest wastes of time for software professionals. Instead of creating great products, much energy is spent on migration and straw-men. We owe our customers better quality than the competition: less bugs, sometimes less features, certainly more usefulness and vision. Tricking them into signing up with us through the idiosyncrasies of windows and how it treats file formats is something users have been savvy to since Word Perfect was squashed in the 80s. They just haven’t figured out a way around those policies yet.
8:01:54 AM 
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