Re: what does "serialization" mean?

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/12/04 

Date: 11 Jul 2004 17:15:18 -0700

Programmer Dude <Chris@Sonnack.com> wrote in message news:<t823e05dut82981g0f5obks0vjh12oundf@4ax.com>...
> Edward G. Nilges writes:
>
> > But at the same time I like looking at files,
> > such as Word files, in "Ascii".
>
> Do you mean "in English"? As far as I know, Word files are
> never ASCII at any point during their normal life.

Nope, I mean I like looking at Word files in a display in which any
character other than the characters available on my keyboard are in
the form &#nnnnn, where nnnnn is the unicode value of the character.

I call this an Ascii representation because in fact, each character OF
THE REPRESENTATION is in the Ascii value range 0..255. One of the most
common uses of Ascii refers to this range DESPITE the fact that Ascii
was orginally a seven bit code.

Basically it is in the vendors interest that at some psychological
level the user regards the representation of data in the vendors
closed-source package as Kantian-transcendental and "unknowable" (the
incorrect presentation of Kant in philosophy survey classes, which
wrongly stresses "unknowability" of the transcendental, is in fact
preparation for technology worship).

For example, Wordperfect provided (and for all I know continues to
provide) the way to view, manipulate and change the internal
representation of a WP file. Word has never provided this both as a
safeguard against reverse engineering and to permit MS to change the
format at-will.

Nonetheless it is a simple matter to extract the text of a Word file
using my technique which transgresses the psychological resistance to
crossing a false-transcendental boundary.

This insight may be characterised as a lack of reverence for
artifacts.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: what does "serialization" mean?
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