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I have always wondered why Open Document standard would not be based around HTML instead of inventing new XML schema? Can someone who has more insight on ODF/O
by jpkeisala 14y ago
I have always wondered why Open Document standard would not be based around HTML instead of inventing new XML schema?
Can someone who has more insight on ODF/OOXML tell me why HTML is not suitable for office document format?
- JoachimSchipper 14y agoOpen Office has a far richer format than HTML allows (e.g. "this is a footnote", "this footer on every page, 2cm from the bottom", ...). Of course, one could extend HTML to handle all that, but just starting with XML is cleaner.
- willvarfar 14y agoReally, what we need to adopt en-mass is Tex.
- ZenPsycho 14y agoI won't even acknowledge a document unless it's hand-written postscript.
- AndrewDucker 14y agoAll sorts of things Tex doesn't handle. Embedded editable files, for instance. Or markup for tracking changes. Tex might make a good starting point for building a system that _did_ do all of that, but nobody seems to be working on that.
- politician 14y ago> Or markup for tracking changes. I've often wondered why Microsoft chose to embed a weak implementation of version control into their mutable document format instead of doing something like passing around a signed chain of immutable documents.
- MichaelGG 14y agoThe people that made change tracking probably wanted the feature to work and be usable, rather than create another crypto product and have no one figure it out. Also, if you don't trust the other parties, you can use the compare feature an get a diff of the documents. Keeping your own copy is a easy, simple, way to get a correct view of changes to a document.
- politician 14y agoRight, so, "signed" in the same sense that a chain of git commits are signed. In other words, resiliency not trust, and full history instead of whatever Track Changes provides.
- MichaelGG 14y agoSure, and Microsoft provides document signing/rights management, as well, if you can get the supporting infrastructure. Office apps also have built in change revision history. Track Changes is sorta orthogonal here, I think.
- AndrewDucker 14y agoBecause I don't want a list of separate changes - I want a series of notes _inside_ the document, colour coded for the editors, marked as accepted/rejected, etc. You can do a mediocre job of inferring the latter from the former, but for 100% support you need to actually put the notes into the file itself.
- Edootjuh 14y agoThat seems like a bad idea. TeX doesn't allow separation between markup and presentation very well. Something like DocBook[1] with a presentation engine like XSLT might be better, if it wasn't for the verbosity of the XML source. [1] http://www.docbook.org/whatis http://www.docbook.org/whatis
- zdw 14y ago+1. Any representation that makes people think "this is a paragraph", "this is a title", "this is a list" and then apply styles to each is an improvement over the current "lets vomit text on a page, then tweak individual sections independently" method endorsed by most word processors. Tools that do this like (Pandoc being the one I like) do a great job of getting people to think of documents as text that gets styled later.
- hippich 14y agoHTML made for continuous display and re-flowing for different sizes. ODF is for publishing, i.e. where you can have separate pages, with footers, margins, absolute position inside page (versus whole document), corrections tracking, authorship, figures. HTML _can_ give you close result, but this is not HTML domain, hence separate standard.