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> I'm a little bit relieved now, because even after reading this well-written article, I still don't understand what it was supposed to do, what problem it was
by Someone 3y ago
> I'm a little bit relieved now, because even after reading this well-written article, I still don't understand what it was supposed to do, what problem it was supposed to solve, and how it was supposed to be used.
Microsoft has OLE, where you can paste an excel sheet in a word document (or vice versa), and third parties can similarly provide components that can be pasted inside word or excel documents.
OpenDoc tried to be that cross-platform without having applications such as word or excel having the special status of being able to host such components. Instead, you got a blank document. If you wanted to write a text document, you dragged in a word processor component.
The various ‘Works’ suites (Microsoft Works, ClarisWorks) worked like that, but weren’t extensible.
OpenDoc wanted to do it better, making it easier for third parties to get a piece of the pie (for example, adding new chart types should be trivial to do for users: buy/download the part (OpenDoc’s name for a component), and drag it into your Excel or ClarisWorks spreadsheet)
So, for end users, it would make it easier to combine everything they needed in a single document. A bit like Eclipse, but that only does rectangular tiles, and doesn’t, for example, allow text to flow around an illustration or web components, if there were a GUI that allowed you to build web pages by dragging them around on a blank page (who’s busy writing that?)
OpenDoc also tried to improve on OLE by not requiring users to click to activate a part so that you could interact with it.
Now, why didn’t it work out? It’s more complex than an office suite that’s not extensible, requires cooperation between competitors, hardware was too slow even for an implementation in C++ (which, apart from efficiency of compiled code, is the wrong language for implementing such a thing, but we didn’t have better), and the benefits for end users weren’t that large ¿yet?