[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML and (K)Office
Matthew Sergeant (EML) writes: [David] > > Anyway, let's get this right -- I think that it's healthy for > > both Gnumeric and the KOffice Spreadsheet program both to exist, > > but there is no excuse for them to use entirely incompatible > > formats. As a matter of fact, if we could convince KDE and Gnome > > to use compatible XML formats for lots of things (like interface > > construction), the media's predictions of a Linux fracture will > > be proven to be hot air. [Matt] > Although I agree to an extent, if they have different feature sets > it's pretty unlikely that you're going to get an entirely perfect > agreement on a spreadsheet DTD. I disagree *very* strongly -- with Namespaces, we can design a common format for the 90% of functionality that the two spreadsheets actually have in common (text cells, data cells, basic formulas, general formatting information [font, alignment, colour, size], etc.) and then allow each to provide extended information unambiguously-delimited through the use of separate namespaces. The more material in the common spec, the better interoperability. Linux needs to set an example here. > However, that's the beauty of XML. Writing a converter from one > format to another is trivial in the extreme, so it's not a huge > issue in my (humble) opinion. For n XML-based formats, we need (n * (n - 1)) converters. If there are only two different XML-based spreadsheet formats, then we need only two converters: a => b b => a If there are three XML-based different formats, then we need six converters: a => b a => c b => a b => c c => a c => b If there are four different XML-based formats, then we need twelve converters: a => b a => c a => d b => a b => c b => d c => a c => b c => d d => a d => b d => c Add a couple more, and the problem definitely isn't easy by any definition. Ten different XML-based formats requires 90 converters, and a change to only one of the formats will require changes to (2 * (n - 1)), or 18 converters! All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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