Dotan Cohen wrote:
Naz, the problem is that there is no reference implementation of odf.
It is similar to the fact that different web browsers display websites
differently, even though the websites are W3C compliant and so are the
browsers. It is different interpretations of the same law, like
Kashrut and Halal.
Documents that use proper styles should display fine on all compliant
systems, even if they will look different. But for the type of
appearance-based editing that most people (including myself) do, they
get mumbled. The situation will only get worse when MS Office starts
supporting odf shortly, and they will have their own implementation
that is likely not to be to spec. So you will have OOo, Koffice, and
Abiword that all display the same document differently even thought
everything is to spec, and you will have MS Office that displays
things yet differently and is not to spec. And because MS Office is so
widely deployed.... [insert doomsday theory here]
Being a web developer I fully understand the futility of perfectly
rendering a semantically defined document using different rendering
implementations. However, surely the ODF spec could have been designed
in such a way to avoid at least destructive editing? That the different
editors should edit the semantic *content* of the doc, even though the
display is different. I can understand and very well live with different
document presentations, but incompatible editing? That's another thing
entirely.
To me, I feel that it is an unacceptible, totally self-defeating
situation where an ODF created by one app and shared with a user of
another app actually *breaks* the document. This, IMHO is actually a
worse situation than if we'd had a multitude of formats (one for OOo,
one for KO, one for Abi etc) as at least then we'd know what app was the
document's generating app. As it is now, there's no easy way to know,
and opening it with the wrong one will silently mangle the document.
Regards,
- Naz.
--
السلام عليكم
Web: www.mrnaz.com
Ph: +61 400 460 662
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