Well it only needs to be better than DOC and WordML... StarOffice/OpenOffice has about ten years of practical use in an Office Suite (not just a word processor, they had to consider integration), and then it went through a standardisation process (one that MS withdrew from). It's supported by OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, and KOffice.
The format itself is a zip file with some xml and image files, etc. It's very easy to use.
I'm unrelated to the OOo project or ODF, but as my.sig says I write a converter that deals with the format.
Most people either don't know or don't care, but if IBM or some country said all employees had to use ODT in order to preserve data then it would affect MSWord's market share.
Sure Microsoft provide libraries that are thin wrappers around Win32 (eg, WinForms) but you could equally say it depends on GTK because Mono make libraries that use that. It all depends on the particular libraries you use and what their dependancies are.
Infact Mono provide an entire stack of free (as in Gnu) and platform independent libraries for developing.Net.
If a programmer thinks Microsoft is.Net they'll probably end up with Win32 dependancies, but it's a managable issue, and certainly not a necessary part of.Net.
The mime type thing is a "should" not a "must" in the guidelines, therefore IE has support for XHTML.
It's a myth that not being able to handle the mime-type means the client doesn't understand XHTML as the guidelines clearly state it's recommended but unnecessary.
Well some OOo hackers on fedora blog were posting about drawing dialogs with Mozilla's XUL. This is because currently dialogs aren't resizable and in order to be multi-lingual they allocate space for the longest translation of any term! That's why there's so much whitespace in the English version of OOo.
The dialogs might be done in XUL and as NeoOffice has proved it's quite possible to port the entire app to another toolkit. So why not XUL throughout -- then put it on the web... it'd probably be quite healthy for boths apps.
Firstly, people usually publish metadata, and domain-specific metadata, by following standards within their industry (defacto standards/proprietary/open/whatever). This doesn't necessitate holding the information locally, that's just a file location. What's important is having access to that information. If Google can help people get more files online that's a good thing but it's no different than if the donor put the file on their own site.
Secondly there are metadata standards and ways of getting information out of files. There's the obvious title / author / subject tags in HTML, and equivalejnt in MS Word files, OpenDocument, Dublin Core, etc. Because there's often a blurry line between content and metadata (title / author / subject are typically both) it's then a question of domain-specific languages and whether search engines can index them. Take XBRL for example, which showing financial reporting information and industry search engines can trawl it and let you search fields and see trends. More industry specific formats will occur in time, consolidate, and we'll get rich data. It's taking its own sweet time but we've got more structured documents now that we did 5 years ago.
Third, it's not a sure thing that categories and metadata are even the way to help you find things. When it comes to categories vs tagging I'll take tagging any day for finding the relationship between things rather than a formally expressed categories. Formal categories are hard to maintain and don't scale, this is the lesson of Google's search being built (largely) around link terms, and why Yahoo Directory is so out of date, Statistical Analysis beats Categories Hierarchies (well, most of the time).
If anyone's trying to write open source software that uses MS Word, here's a web service that uses OpenOffice.org to convert to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 format, and then optionally runs the XML through an XSLT pipeline to make any XML/HTML.
I had about 100 test documents and I tried using Abiword, WVWare, but OpenOffice.org had the best reverse engineering of msword. Is there any other open source conversion software I should have used?
I'd disagree, I mean the virtualhosts bit looks like XML... but it's not, so you get the syntax hassle but not the benefits. The rest is key=value but people don't edit that so much, and it's almost worth the hassle to make it all XML.
I'd like XML because it'd make it easier on GUI editors, and I really there's no part of the config that couldn't be put in a GUI.
It's not a new account, it's had heavy use in the past, the account owner is reputable, and if they'd checked the referrer they'd see the reason why it's getting so much cash. If they checked the history they'd see it's handled money for many charities in the past. Try reading the article next time, it's not a new account.
Dude, you're wrong. As far as appropriate uses of XML goes who do you think would be the authority on that? The W3C who created XML? James Clark? Dave Pawson? People from SGML?
The answer is that all of these groups and people created a XSLT - a functional XML programming language. That's right, the people who produce the XML spec also produced an XML programming language, just like Ant.
XML is a meta-markup language, a series of rules, and you can represent data files as much as you can represent programming languages because they're all text files. You may as well say MAKE scripts are also a misuse of technology, being ASCII, if you're going to claim that ASCII should only be used for configuration files.
With constructs that can be compiled who's to say XML can't be a programming language? The W3C say that depending on the domain it can be, and they disagree with you.
It might have been a decision by one guy without the right approval or process. They might fear embarassment of a policy they can't defend. There's all kinds of ways things can change.
As I understand it the GNU argument is that it's more like individual rights. Law is about satisfying the majority while protecting minority rights. The idea of GNU (again, as I understand it) is that it's a minority right to develop software and build communities around it.
While the majority may not write software, and only use it, the choice for one of them to change the software is part of the GNU belief (as I understand it). People can like what they want and do the popular thing but the minority rights shouldn't be infringed. That's the theory.
In practice, GNU has no such minority rights. Copyright is used to protect minority rights. That's where the distinction between people (majority) and the wants of individuals is made.
This may all sound loony but they're well within their current legal rights to do so.
1. Binary data can be referenced in external files. Consider the OpenOffice xml format, where it's a single zip file with multiple xml files and the binaries that are referenced. 2. It's inefficient compared to binary, but then it's more readable to programmers (and even some non-programmers feel comfortable opening a file, searching for a term, and replacing it - as my non-programmer boss did once).
If you're after a binary format try EBML at sourceforge. It's a binary equivalent of XML syntax.
Generally I think you're being too harsh on text formats. Plaintext configuration files (non-xml, I'm thinking of unix config files) have shown their worth, and binary configuration files mean you need custom editors. The processing time of XML vs binary is meaningless and is not a bottleneck for most applications -- especially this one where it'd only be XML for the data transfer. So far as bandwidth goes it could be gzipped.
XML isn't a particular language, it's a metalanguage, and depending on the format it can provide information on how to interpret a document as much as a binary source file could. Whether the logic should be with the file is again a question of implementation, so there's no reason to complain about binary or XML unless you'd like to get more specific about which format is lacking (and then it would probably be a mistake in that format, not XML).
XML is so much easier for programmers than binary. Many people who think they know XML think it's just the XML spec rather than the surrounding standards such as XSLT, XSLFO, XQuery, Schema, RelaxNG - maybe even Tamino. People can't really say they know XML well unless they understand those specs and the implementations.
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The format itself is a zip file with some xml and image files, etc. It's very easy to use.
I'm unrelated to the OOo project or ODF, but as my .sig says I write a converter that deals with the format.
Most people either don't know or don't care, but if IBM or some country said all employees had to use ODT in order to preserve data then it would affect MSWord's market share.
Eat my shorts
I've fallen and I can't get up.
I'd buy that for a dollar.
Not the momma!
WOOOAAHH
(that last one was Joey from TV's Blossom... what a dreamboat, and jokes age)
This is untrue.
Sure Microsoft provide libraries that are thin wrappers around Win32 (eg, WinForms) but you could equally say it depends on GTK because Mono make libraries that use that. It all depends on the particular libraries you use and what their dependancies are.
Infact Mono provide an entire stack of free (as in Gnu) and platform independent libraries for developing .Net.
If a programmer thinks Microsoft is .Net they'll probably end up with Win32 dependancies, but it's a managable issue, and certainly not a necessary part of .Net.
^^ he isn't me, but he may as well be.
It's a myth that not being able to handle the mime-type means the client doesn't understand XHTML as the guidelines clearly state it's recommended but unnecessary.
Some macros or all? I didn't think StarBasic or UNO was related to Java.
The dialogs might be done in XUL and as NeoOffice has proved it's quite possible to port the entire app to another toolkit. So why not XUL throughout -- then put it on the web ... it'd probably be quite healthy for boths apps.
Out of someone else's arse actually, a post on SA. I should check my facts.
How have Google been showing interest in OpenOffice / OpenDocument? Did I miss something?
I only casually read about this kind of stuff, but this one seems to make the forum goers happy. Expensive as anything though.
There's several points here,
Firstly, people usually publish metadata, and domain-specific metadata, by following standards within their industry (defacto standards/proprietary/open/whatever). This doesn't necessitate holding the information locally, that's just a file location. What's important is having access to that information. If Google can help people get more files online that's a good thing but it's no different than if the donor put the file on their own site.
Secondly there are metadata standards and ways of getting information out of files. There's the obvious title / author / subject tags in HTML, and equivalejnt in MS Word files, OpenDocument, Dublin Core, etc. Because there's often a blurry line between content and metadata (title / author / subject are typically both) it's then a question of domain-specific languages and whether search engines can index them. Take XBRL for example, which showing financial reporting information and industry search engines can trawl it and let you search fields and see trends. More industry specific formats will occur in time, consolidate, and we'll get rich data. It's taking its own sweet time but we've got more structured documents now that we did 5 years ago.
Third, it's not a sure thing that categories and metadata are even the way to help you find things. When it comes to categories vs tagging I'll take tagging any day for finding the relationship between things rather than a formally expressed categories. Formal categories are hard to maintain and don't scale, this is the lesson of Google's search being built (largely) around link terms, and why Yahoo Directory is so out of date, Statistical Analysis beats Categories Hierarchies (well, most of the time).
CompactFlash can only have about 2000 read/writes before failing. It's good for photos, and that's it. A ramdrive is better, but expensive.
If anyone's trying to write open source software that uses MS Word, here's a web service that uses OpenOffice.org to convert to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 format, and then optionally runs the XML through an XSLT pipeline to make any XML/HTML.
I had about 100 test documents and I tried using Abiword, WVWare, but OpenOffice.org had the best reverse engineering of msword. Is there any other open source conversion software I should have used?
I'd disagree, I mean the virtualhosts bit looks like XML... but it's not, so you get the syntax hassle but not the benefits. The rest is key=value but people don't edit that so much, and it's almost worth the hassle to make it all XML.
I'd like XML because it'd make it easier on GUI editors, and I really there's no part of the config that couldn't be put in a GUI.
It's not a new account, it's had heavy use in the past, the account owner is reputable, and if they'd checked the referrer they'd see the reason why it's getting so much cash. If they checked the history they'd see it's handled money for many charities in the past. Try reading the article next time, it's not a new account.
The answer is that all of these groups and people created a XSLT - a functional XML programming language. That's right, the people who produce the XML spec also produced an XML programming language, just like Ant.
XML is a meta-markup language, a series of rules, and you can represent data files as much as you can represent programming languages because they're all text files. You may as well say MAKE scripts are also a misuse of technology, being ASCII, if you're going to claim that ASCII should only be used for configuration files.
With constructs that can be compiled who's to say XML can't be a programming language? The W3C say that depending on the domain it can be, and they disagree with you.
What's the alternative? Platform specific code that stretches just as far and you'd need to rewrite for each platform?
Nah, it's never that one-sided.
It might have been a decision by one guy without the right approval or process. They might fear embarassment of a policy they can't defend. There's all kinds of ways things can change.
Why is it so dark then. Those aren't my windows desktop colours.
While the majority may not write software, and only use it, the choice for one of them to change the software is part of the GNU belief (as I understand it). People can like what they want and do the popular thing but the minority rights shouldn't be infringed. That's the theory.
In practice, GNU has no such minority rights. Copyright is used to protect minority rights. That's where the distinction between people (majority) and the wants of individuals is made.
This may all sound loony but they're well within their current legal rights to do so.
Hey there, Microsoft whip him too.
1. Binary data can be referenced in external files. Consider the OpenOffice xml format, where it's a single zip file with multiple xml files and the binaries that are referenced.
2. It's inefficient compared to binary, but then it's more readable to programmers (and even some non-programmers feel comfortable opening a file, searching for a term, and replacing it - as my non-programmer boss did once).
If you're after a binary format try EBML at sourceforge. It's a binary equivalent of XML syntax.
Generally I think you're being too harsh on text formats. Plaintext configuration files (non-xml, I'm thinking of unix config files) have shown their worth, and binary configuration files mean you need custom editors. The processing time of XML vs binary is meaningless and is not a bottleneck for most applications -- especially this one where it'd only be XML for the data transfer. So far as bandwidth goes it could be gzipped.
XML isn't a particular language, it's a metalanguage, and depending on the format it can provide information on how to interpret a document as much as a binary source file could. Whether the logic should be with the file is again a question of implementation, so there's no reason to complain about binary or XML unless you'd like to get more specific about which format is lacking (and then it would probably be a mistake in that format, not XML).
XML is so much easier for programmers than binary. Many people who think they know XML think it's just the XML spec rather than the surrounding standards such as XSLT, XSLFO, XQuery, Schema, RelaxNG - maybe even Tamino. People can't really say they know XML well unless they understand those specs and the implementations.
Pretty like a Ponay
Use Access 2003 as your frontend to MySQL