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

[Erwin Tenhumberg <erwin tenhumberg sun com>]

Hi,

I just saw this thread.

This week we will have the first OpenOffice.org Conference
in Hamburg, Germany.

Since we will also have an XML track it might be interesting
for some of you to come.

The current agenda can be found at

http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/schedule.html


Best regards,
Erwin


Russell McOrmond wrote:
> 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, 
>  VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen 
>  and not a third party.   -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/
>
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