Re: Extending the GNOME system (ideal)

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 09:52:53AM +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Elliot Lee wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Alan wrote:
> > 
> > > Disclaimer: While I am a progammer, I'm not a GNOME/bonobo programmer, so some
> > > things here might simply not be possible.  Also, I'm working off of a discussion
> > > that occured in a car first thing in the morning, so I might be talking out of
> > > my butt :)
> > > 
> > > Anyway, the discussion went something like this.  Gnumeric does a good job of
> > > using various bonobo components to create text, graphs, do spell checking, and
> > > so on.  Why not make an entire app out of that.
> > 
> > [snippage]
> > 
> > Nautilus pretty much does this type of thing. It doesn't take care of one
> > compound document with a bunch of objects inside, but that is really
> > impossible to do in a generic manner. The "MS Word inside MSIE" example
> > would work fine with Nautilus, though.
> > 
> 
> We hope that we can put AbiWord inside Nautilus (and evolution for that
> matter) to do this. We will certainly try anyway. It would be nice to get
> this done for 1.4 extras. We will try.

Part of the the discussion that prompted my original email was that the "open
word in ie" kinda sucked.  You still had two very separate apps doing very
separate jobs.  We figured that creating a container window that could hold
components from any other app would be a cool way to go.  Having nautilus open
abiword as a component is cool, don't get me wrong, but this is more of a long
term thought.  

A couple of links thrown to me by a friend regarding this sort of thing:

XML and DOM
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-DOM-Level-3-Content-Models-and-Load-Save-20001101/

IBM OpenDoc (doing (or trying to do) this 6 or so years ago apparently)
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/ad/opendoc/

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