Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 09:17:58PM +0200, Uri David Akavia wrote:
> Sorry, forgot to post to the list

Content-Description: Forwarded message - Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric
> Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 21:16:39 +0200
> From: Uri David Akavia <uridavid netvision net il>
> Subject: Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric
> To: Russell McOrmond <russell flora ca>
> X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.5
>
> Just a comment from a user. If I'm wrong please correct me.
> > If not OASIS, then how do we move this
> > critical issue forward?  It will be very important to getting FLOSS office
> > productivity suites into larger corporate and government clients. 
> >   While AbiWord and GIMP have MS Windows versions, I don't believe that
> > GNUmeric or any of the other GNOME office or KOffice tools are ported to
> > MS Windows.
>
> Is the issue you're talking about promoting free software? Free software
> can be promoted by cost, interportability.
> Open standards is a great advantage - However, I don't think that the
> different office suites need to agree on an identical file format.
> Gnumeric file format is an open standard - it is not very widespread,
> but it is open and all gnumeric files use this standard.
> Agreeing on differnet ways of embedding, communicating between
> processes, clipboard format and so forth is much more important and more
> useful, as I understand it.

I tend to agree.  From a user perspective supporting clipboard and
content interoperatiblity is more important than our sharing a
common file format.  It would certainly be nice to have something
common, but once you start to expand beyond the trivial common cases
the implementation details in the applications make sharing
difficult.  As an example one of the nice element of OpenCalc's
format is it's unambiguous reference syntax in formulas.

    =[.A1]

The reference always includes a sheet mark, and has the handy
delimter characters to bracket it.  However, that format is only
possible because OpenCalc enforces the fact that a sheet name does
not contain '.', Gnumeric does not require that.

Of course that is just an example, as we delve more deeply the
formats become more application specific.  Strangely, the XML in
Ms Office XP is actually slightly simpler to handle.  Probably as a
result of our extensive work to support their binary format.