Thanks to Joel Gallun for this
link.
“The basic bargain the Microsoft Matrix strikes is the same one
France strikes with its citizens: give us your life and we shall
take care of you.”
“But the Matrix is greedy, and its greed has been its
undoing. Three times now, the Matrix has drilled too deep into
my skull, sucked out more of my blood than I was willing to give.
First, it sealed the steel egg of Windows itself too tight – not
letting any of the open-standards proteins outside get in unless
they folded themselves into the egg itself. Second, it tried to
make me feed from a single tube – the one-size-fits-all file
formats of Office. And third, the greed that woke me up and finally
made me retch up all the garbage from my lungs, was the soupy pink
sludginess of FrontPage’s files and folders.”
“Then I met Mark, a gonzo physicist who’d also just crashlanded
in Paris. Chatting among his Linux boxes over some Mexican, I
realised I’d forgotten what code should look like in the raw; I’d
grown distant from the HTML after a year of getting what I saw.
FrontPage was suffocating my site. The HTML FrontPage disgorges is
pageful after pageful of bloated, convoluted code, the pink
nutrient bath a profusion of hidden folders splutching not only my
hard disk, but also my paid-for webspace.”
“The full day it took to extract my site from FrontPage’s
proprietary soup was hard, but fulfilling. I sucked it all off the
web, cleaned up the HTML, deleted the syrupy hidden files, reorg’d
the directories into the patterns I’d seen people clicked into
most. It looked fresh for the first time…”