things more complicated than necessary

What (technical stuff) do you know that's more complicated than necessary and really annoys you ?

Three things I can think of now:

The C++ standard
The DirectShow API
The JPEG2000 standard (actually, I suspect any standard that comes out of ISO)

B.Y.
Thursday, January 29, 2004

SOAP compared to XML-RPC.

Matthew Lock
Thursday, January 29, 2004

So called "standards based" table-less web design. XHTML + CSS vs plain old HTML 4 with tables.

Matthew Lock
Thursday, January 29, 2004

I'm going out on a limb here... but actually anything from the W3C in the last 5 years seems more complicated than it needed to be to me. xforms, xml schema etc

Matthew Lock
Thursday, January 29, 2004

XML -- the idea is so useful, but the standard seems like hack upon hack.  I would love to use it every day at my job but we tend just to use text files because they're easier.  Haven't found an editor that non-technical people at work can really use, which is a requirement, while they have learned to edit text files and Excel very well (a video game company).

The only thing good about the standard is that it is standard, IMO.  It's reached the point where it's there for good, unfortunately -- and changing it for the better would actually be WORSE because it would break the standard.

Roose
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Unicode, just finished reading Joels article, and still hoping I can hide under the 'this doesn't apply to me' bucket.

all that FF FE and FE FF stuff......

Aussie Chick
Thursday, January 29, 2004

J2EE...?

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Thursday, January 29, 2004

.Net _and_ J2EE.

Giovanni Corriga
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Unicode is not more complicated than it needs to be. It does a good job of capturing the irregulraties of the various languages humans use. The problem of universal text representation _really is_ hard.

On my list, you'll find ...

XML-RPC (compared to MIME-RPC).
MIME-RPC (compared to KIPC).
Win32 API (compared to POSIX).
Almost all graphics toolkits (compared to Qt and FLTK)

Ori Berger
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Unicode?

I live in a non-English-speaking country. In our language, we use a few characters which aren't in the standard ASCII table.

I have always refused to use those characters.

I have even threatened to quit my job and go to the USA if they keep requiring this.

Death to Unicode!

Maximum Overdrive
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Source Control - I haven't met a source control that feels totally natural yet.

programming jerk
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Some people have already alluded to this, but just to say it right out in the open:

Essentially any committee-designed standard that isn't just a codification of an existing de facto standard is bound to be overly complex to the point where no implementation is 100% compatible.  Way too many companies & people throwing in their pet ideas make for a complex, non-uniform design.

Please end this madness, standards bodies.

Mister Fancypants
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Ah, despair:

"None of us is as dumb as all of us."

m
Thursday, January 29, 2004

my code

danp
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Women...  What they're not technical?

Zekaric
Thursday, January 29, 2004

If you twiddle the right things you'll find that womem behave just the way you want.

Friday, January 30, 2004

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