[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML and (K)Office
At 21:55 25/03/1999 , David Megginson wrote: | [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. Why do namespaces help us here? It: * Breaks validation. We are no longer able to ensure that the files we are reading/creating are correct and useful. * Still has the variations between applications, so that a reader of a given format still needs to know 100% about what is that format. Without the rigour of a DTD, we've got nothing. Particularly since this data may well live long, and is not some transient "sent over the web" data. How will future users make sense of the format without a DTD? | > 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 Again, having namespaces doesn't solve this problem. Regardless of what you call it, if the formats are different, they're different. But anyway, this reasoning isn't necessarily true. What about: a => x b => x c => x x => a x => b x => c That is, an intermediate DTD that captures all the usefully sharable data. For a successful example of this, see the Rainbow DTDs for word documents. This greatly reduces the number of conversions as the number of formats increases. Cheers, James ------------------------- James Robertson Step Two Designs Pty Ltd SGML, XML & HTML Consultancy http://www.steptwo.com.au/ jamesr@s... "Beyond the Idea" ACN 081 019 623 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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