Re: HSSFSerializer - Extensions?

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:31:07PM -0500, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
> My preference would be (this markup is off the top of my head and not 
> intended to be accurate, just give the picture):
>
> <styles>
>  <style number="1">....color, background, etc </style>
> </styles>
>
> <styleregions>
>  <styleregion startcol....startrow...endrow.... style="1"/>
> </styleregions>
>
> <cells>
>   <cell row="1", col="2" style="1"></cell>
> </cells>
Yup that was pretty much what I was thinking.  It seems cleaner to
split the specification of the style out of the detail of the region
particularly in the case where the resulting regions with the same
style are somewhat disjoint.  Once we have that the slight extension
to support optional per cell style specification is trivial.
Gnumeric itself would not export things that way but we could import
it trivially.

We would specify the styles on a per sheet basis, and would leave
things like the number format and font details merged in rather than
splitting them ala OpenOffice.

Sound reasonable ?

Other elements I was hoping to address was to
    - store calculated values
    - merge the various bits of view information out of their
      multiple records
    - store custom colour history
    - make sheet object format more extensible
    - explore ways to handle external references, and their values