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

[Russell McOrmond <russell flora ca>]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> I believe we're arguing about degrees here.  Gnumeric and other
> GNOME Office tools will certainly be able to read and write the
> OASIS format.  That is a requirement of any format with a widely
> installed userbase.  However, the behaviours of 'office' apps is
> sufficiently complex that I don't see them as commoditized items yet.

  The best analogy at this time is to Web browsers.  There is a lot of
innovation possible (and happening) with web browsers, but it is best when
this is not at the HTML, HTTP (or worse, TCP/IP) layers.

  Users who are doing ColdFusion on their websites know that they are
doing ColdFusion, know that they aren't doing HTML, and should understand
that not everyone will be able to see their documents.

  There was a huge problem with the whole "best viewed by" stupidity that
Microsoft and Netscape brought us in their battle for market share, and we
still haven't gotten entirely out of it.  We do have a much stronger push
toward having websites support multiple browsers, and do so by adhering to
W3C standards.

  Web developers are a much more technically savvy group of people than
your average office productivity user.  Any incompatibilities will be
harmful to us.  If all FLOSS suites don't interoperate "as the default"  
for the features of spreadsheets that most people use, then the share of
the market that Microsoft currently enjoys may never change significantly.

> IMO file formats are significantly more complex than network or hardware
> protocols and the underlying feature set is by no means standardised
> enough yet to support a single format for everyone.

  The question is: Is this seen as a bug, or a feature.  Is something
really gained by having these formats be that complex?

  Is it better to dumb-down the feature set within interchange file
formats to achieve this compatibility, or continue to 'enhance' the tools
in ways that keep them incompatible?  Is this something worth getting
together with other FLOSS suites to work on?  Will folks from GNOME
Office, KOffice and OpenOffice.org be willing to come together on this to
try to push compatibility as a way to grab market share from Microsoft?

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
 Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, 
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