RE: GNOME Document model

[Frater Reklaw <fraterreklaw yahoo com>]

<snip>

>I'm going to have to respectfully disagree.  >'[E]mbedding
otherprograms' is
>not The Unix Way, at least not in the OLE sense.  The
>unix command line gains the bulk of its power from >giving you the
>ability to piece together *little* atomic parts of >things to
>accomplish a task...which may be entirely unique.  OLE >is all about
>letting *fat* applications tickle the innards of each >other to gain
>some integration.  It is not conceptually much >different than what
>Borland was doing with Paradox and Quattro on DOS in >the late 80's.
>I could have Paradox load up Quattro and do some >calculations or a
>graph for me.  It was crap, but nice for DOS.

What you are describing sounds more like OLE version 1.0. Miguel wants
to *model after* OLE2. OLE2 was a giant step ahead of OLE1. Sadly, The
fat MS apps you
refer to don't use most of the functionality of OLE2.

>What I was hoping for (expecting, really) was more of >the OpenDoc
>goal.  If I don't like table editing tool A, let me >use table editing
>tool B, or write table editing tool C and plug it into >the Corba bus.
>The document editor need not change. I don't need to >know the API's of
>the document editor, I just need to know a standard >set of API's that
>let me get at my data to do my thing with it.   I can >mail the
document
>to another user who prefers table editor D and he can >still use it.
>I don't need to write a whole *application* to edit >tables.

This would be address in what (in windows) is called the OLE Document
Storage model. Basicly, A OLE document
is a collection of document types and the data of that part of the
document. In MS Windows reality, document types look sort of like
"progname.document.1" with GUID attached. If programs used a common
storage type like RTF, vcard, JPG, PNG, etc. for thier data and used a
standard document type convention (like MIME?) you would be able to
have table editor D embeded in your app working on the data written by
table editor A on someone else's machine. 



==
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Reklaw
Visit my gnomepage at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Foothills/3401/



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