In article <rYGdnZcM1952kyLanZ2dnUVZ_hninZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
alt <spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> > We could have one format that would have truly become universal. Oh
> >> > well, I forgot--choice is good, so I guess it is supposed to be good
> >> > that people will have to deal with two formats for the foreseeable
> >> > future.
> >>
> >> Why should the document format support all of Microsoft's
> >> (undocumented) legacy crap? Shouldn't that be the job of the
> >> application?
> >
> > The application needs to be able to save information about that legacy
> > "crap", hence there is a need for some way to do that in the document
> > format.
>
> I still don't understand. All conceivable objects in a document can be
> expressed in non-proprietary methods. The application should be the one
> doing the conversion from proprietary to non-proprietary methods.
Let's try this from the other direction. Ask yourself why we need
anything other than RTF for word processing and CSV for spreadsheets.
A document format needs to represent all the per-document state that you
need to preserve between uses of the document by the application. The
capabilities of the applications dictate what the format needs to
support. Office, StarOffice, WordPerfect, and others have different
capabilities, and none of them are a subset of another one--they each
have things that the others don't support. So, depending on which one's
features you want the document format to support, you get different
formats.
The difference between a format that supports exactly what StarOffice
needs, and nothing more, and a format that supports exactly what Office
needs for current and legacy documents and nothing more, is (I'm told--I
haven't personally checked this out) small. Hence, if Sun had went
along with the desires of the majority of the OASIS group that defined
ODF, and included support for those other applications, we'd have one
standard now, that works well for them all, and would not really be much
larger or difficult to deal with than the current ODF. But Sun
considers standards a strategic weapon, and made sure that ODF would not
include anything that StarOffice didn't need, and so we are doomed to at
least two standards. :-(
--
--Tim Smith
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