>Interesting you should say that, Nigel. Way back when we first heard >that NW is going Cocoa, several list members suggested that NW's native >format should be XML. Since there's no word on that, I guess we can >still hope. > >> The use of RTF as a file format is not good, RTF stands for "Random >> Text Format" or something like that - not even Word can consistently >> write & read RTF files (here people are strongly advised against using >> RTF). Though it is rather overworked right now, surely a much better >> file format would be XML? Define a Nisus DTD and away we go...
Regarding advices *against* using RTF. What would the alternate be, if I might ask, for "fancy/formatted text"? Anything else than MS native formats support? As for XML, as a general translation format for wordprocessors, I don't think it has been put to much use? So any practical use of it in that regard is unlikely. The benefit would have been related to NWX itself: since XML is such a powerful markup language, it could opened up for easy ways to provide conversion and transformation to/from NW documents. It would have set forth an "open way" for scripting NW documents, with any tool as well as the tools NWX also needs to serve us with. It would somehow mean that even if Nisus would develop *their own* XML-based NWX-format, we would know quite a bit about that strutcture since it was XML-based. For instance transformation into RTF-documents, html-docs, tex-docs and so on could easily be provided for then, even if Nisus did not offer these tools themselves. Even MSWOrd-docs, should there be an XML-formula available for them. (MS brags a lot about XML in their Office apps, don't they?) My point is: XML is no word of magic. It is interesting that RTF was chosen as the default format for "fancy text" on OSX: MS rules and open/documented standard rules. The editor Style with its excellent RTF-support got styles which NW lacks, thanks to RTF. It seems to me that RTF has got a bad reputation due to a lot of programs that had bad RTF-interpretors. (NW being one of them.) And when Geoffry once asked about how an application can be good at importing docs which contain formats that the importing program does not provide (like tables, in NW), then we can add that RTF both got tables, and footnotes and a whole lot more. With Cocoa NWX we must expect to be able to exchange documents with *any* OSX applicaton. In a kind of NW-native format: Cocoa RTF. That's good news. In classic NW we can't even save to SimpleText document format with perfect results, which is really embarrasing. We will have different experiences with RTF. But much better than before (in MacOS Classic) when everything was so 100% MacOS spesific and NW really had *no* way for doing *proper* "fancy text" exchange, except via external commercial converters. -- leif --------------------------------------------------- The Nisus Interactive List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Searchable archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/nisus-interactive%40nisus.com/ To unsubscribe from this list please send a message with "unsubscribe nisus-interactive" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
