Re: a standard for diagram document format

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Jun 11, 2008, at 10:01 PM, Diego Jacobi wrote:

> I am not sure if an standard of it could be made in the strict sense  
> of the word.
>
> Diagrams are used for too many kind of representations in many  
> different ways. And example could be an electronic circuit analysis  
> in blocks vs a genealogical tree. (The last having a std. format)
>
> Both are too much different so it will depend on the application.

I don't think so. Yes, formats specifically made for either one could  
be more concise and have more assumptions built in, but both would be  
doable in a generic diagram. It's rarely a question of "can't" or  
"can", but of how cumbersome it is. I have done poster layout in both  
Dia and Excel, for lack of a really good layout program. Neither are  
made for it, but both can be used. That said, there's an immense  
danger in trying to do a format that can do everything. Picking a few  
core use cases (say, informal UML, flow charts, illustration of memory  
layout) would make it easier to see what's essential.

> Just using a zipped XML with a png screnshoot like in ODF will be  
> good enough (i don't know how is the actual format). And of course,  
> the format should be on top of SVG, then any exporting or printing  
> functionality would be done by a common library for svg.
>
> But what dia really needs is to leave the old multiwindows (gimp  
> like) interface which makes it really ugly and nonstandard and make  
> the main widget embeddable for other tools like Abiword, OOo, IDEs,  
> Visual programming languages, electronic circuits, etc.

A single-window interface is part of the next release. As for making  
it embeddable, is there any up-to-date way to do that in Gnome?
> When most programs adopts dia as the main widget for diagrams then  
> its native format will be the standard.
Which would not be a good thing, since a lot of things in Dias native  
format are really "Here is an X as defined by Dia's C code". That's  
not even close to being portable.

-Lars