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OSNews on the LinuxWorld Exhibition Floor

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the places-to-be dept.

Expo writes "OSNews reports on the second day of the LinuxWorld Expo. Highlights of the article is CodeWeaver's CrossOver Photoshop effort and the fact that OpenOffice.org is collaborating with _all_ the other major Linux office suites and word processors towards the creation of a new, open XML-based, file format. NewsForge also has a report."

4 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. suggestion for file extension for new XML document by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    how about ".dox"?

  2. Re:RedHat? by Jonny+Ringo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I often think its becuase of the "first to market" deal. Like Amazon for ecomerce or Ebay for auctions or Yahoo for portals. Redhat has been around for a while (one of the firsts) and they do a pretty decent job of marketing themselves.

    BTW, I am aware that Redhat does not eq linux and Linux was around before Redhat

  3. Re:photoshop on linux?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Never notice? The difference between Aqua and an Aqua theme is pretty damn obvious when you've been using OS X for a while.

  4. Re:I really don't get the big deal. by tim_maroney · · Score: 3, Insightful

    XML does not solve the format change problem. Adding new features to an XML-based word processor would necessarily involve changing the schema. Old applications could well be confused by the new data. They might be able to create a parse tree in memory, but on a semantic level they would not be able to understand what the parse tree meant.

    It's definitely not as easy as just ignoring new data, as you suggest. Suppose the new feature is footnotes within footnotes. Throwing away all the nested footnotes when the data are processed by an old application is not the right way to go. And you can't just blindly preserve the unknown information either, since transforms done to the rest of the data (e.g., changing the font universally to Garamond) also may need to be applied to the unknown data. Or they may not. If you don't understand the data you don't know whether they need to be done or not, and you may not understand the right way to do the transform.

    Some of these problems can be addressed in part, but they require significant extra infrastructure to do so, and complicate everyday data processing tasks. That is, a format flexible enough to solve most of these problems would be quite hard to deal with on an ongoing basis, due to the need to constantly make decisions based on variant data types and informational attributes. There is no magic bullet for the format change problem.

    --
    Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org