Unit 14 Blog: Some thoughts on Interoperability and Text Editors

While this is not a great “summing up the course experience” theme for a blog, I’d like to discuss why Microsoft Excel 2011 for the Mac does not have an “Import XML Data” option. That seems like such a huge exclusion to me. It doesn’t seem right that a program can be called the same thing but have different functionality depending on the operating system that is running it. According to some users on the Mr. Excel.com forum, XML importing is not a “super in-demand” function of excel, which might be one of the reasons it is not in the Mac version (http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/520375-excel-2011-mac-import-xml.html). It’s a bit ironic that XML is becoming more and more prominent as one of the markup languages of interoperability, yet it isn’t a function of the “interoperable” Microsoft office suite.

I ended up going to the Science and Engineering Library and creating the XML-based spreadsheets on a Windows computer there. One thing that was interesting was that the “date” columns from my CSV spreadsheets were displaying the dates as a series of “#” signs on the Windows computer. When I added the new XML spreadsheets and reopened the document on my mac, the dates were back. It looks like displaying dates and other elements could be another interoperability issue between the Windows and Mac versions of excel. 

Second, I’d like to talk about the differences between Bluefish and my beloved TextWrangler. I had to download an older version of Bluefish (2.2.3) because I am running Mac OS X 10.6.8, which was too old for Bluefish 2.2.5. One thing that I like about Bluefish is that it shows a tag’s starting and ending points. TextWrangler will notify you if you forget to close a tag, but it doesn’t have the same cool highlighting feature. Both programs allow you to collapse information that is contained between two tags. Both have almost the same functionality, although Bluefish’s toolbar approach looks way busier.

TextWrangler is on the left, Bluefish is on the right.

I think my main reason for liking TextWrangler is that I used it first. It got me through some tough times in this class, so it has sentimental value. I understand that we are using Bluefish because both Macs and Windows PC’s can download it. I do think that TextWrangler is a bit prettier than Bluefish.