Re: wishlist: file export feature

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Dec 24, 2001 at 05:12:33PM -0700, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> I am probably missing the point completely, but: if we want to `extend' 
> html why don't we just use xml, hey but we are doing that already....?? 
> Perhaps what is really meant is to write a DTD to display gnumeric xml??

The lines between serialization and rendering are blurry.  Our xml
does not currently have enough information to accurately render to
html.  There are no saved expression values and the format is not
really amenable to easy mapping from xml -> html (shared
expressions, region based styles and merges).  However, we can not
treat html as a pure rendering problem.  Using html as a clipboard
format is tempting given its position as a common denominator.  That
requires us to import various flavours of html.  Once we're doing
that it seems like a short step to export in some of these flavours
too.  This seems like the only way we're going to support rich
copy/paste between OpenOffice and Gnumeric in the foreseeable
future.

However, code trumps talk, and Andreas is the only one working on
the html exporter just now.  Being standards conformant does not
seem like a valid reason to reject patches, so we'll probably see
improved conformance before support for xl's meta magical ms-html.