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Hmm, I believe there're many open-source self-hostable office solutions. And they don't share a universal format.
by est 3mo ago
Hmm, I believe there're many open-source self-hostable office solutions.
And they don't share a universal format.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoWhen the original application is open source, its format is public and anyone who wants to create a converter to another format can either use the original code or inspect it to see how the format works. When the format is proprietary, you get a blob of binary data that you have to reverse engineer through guesswork, made orders of magnitude more difficult if the original service isn't even available anymore.
- est 3mo agoThe problem reminds me of pdf, the format is well known, there are tons of third-party readers, but they all glitch somewhat differently. Also PDF is turing complete. Modern rich content formats are hard. Open formats solves only small part of the problem. I think the universal interchangable format is static HTML.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoPDF is a mess because it's an ancient originally-proprietary format based on a proprietary language and the Adobe "standard" didn't actually specify a lot of important things for a long time, leaving other implementations to try to reverse engineer them. Meanwhile you look at actual standard formats like PNG or UTF-8 or, as you say, HTML, and the implementations generally do a lot better because there is a proper spec.
- preisschild 3mo agoThe Collabora Online Suite for example just uses the OpenDocument formats