Re: Food for thought: Why (and how) should KDE and Gnome unite?

[dep <dep westnet com>]

On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Adam Rotaru wrote:

|  KDE and Gnome already contributed a lot to the acceptance of Linux in
|the desktop market. And this is just the beginning! But as someone said 
|'having two GUI's for an OS is too much'.  Well, I would say, more
|precisely 'having two proposed GUI application standards for an OS is too
|much'.

i'm not a subscriber to this list, so this post is a bit of a shot in
the dark. that having been said, i think that there is a more practical
-- and more achievable -- place where the setting of standards not only
could be accomplished but ought to be.

i have on my machine here a half-dozen "word processors," all in about
the same stage of development. each is currently about as useful as the
windows wordpad program. development on some, such as maxwell and
papyrus, seems pretty much to have halted, which is a shame, because
there is some good code in both. kword and abiword are under
development.

what they all have in common is what they do, within a fairly small
range (of course, in abi and kword this will change). their chief
difference is that each uses a proprietary document format -- no one
can read or write to documents from any of the others.

what we need, far more than we need a merger of gnome and kde, is the
establishment of a common document format.

what would it entail? well, more than html, which doesn't save much, or
rtf, which doesn't handle graphics. what is required is the ability to
save a document in one word processor with not just the expectation but
the certainty that it will open in the same way, graphics the same
places, text formatting unchanged, in a different word processor.
filters are inadequate -- what's needed is a native format built in
from the first line of code. neither kword nor abi is so far along that
this standard could not be employed in them, and if it were stated to
be a standard, in the way that html is a standard, it would be written
to.

this is where the kde and gnome forces, and others, could join to
produce something truly useful.

that's my opinion and my proposal. flames to email because, as i said,
i'm not a subscriber -- i'm having to shovel through 300 or so messages
a day as it is!

best,

--
dep _________________________________________________________________
                                    the world would be a better place
                                    if i were in charge of lightning