Subject: Re: Inline Images??? [ was: Re: Graphic Images ]
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Apr 20 2001 - 13:31:16 CDT
Wow. Methinks you've just destroyed your own argument. Quite convincingly,
too! :-)
At 05:44 PM 4/20/01 +0100, rms@greymalkin.yi.org wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 12:12:12PM -0400, Patrick Lam wrote:
>> On Fri, 20 Apr 2001 rms@greymalkin.yi.org wrote:
>> > Including external content *inside* a file is brain dead. *SPECIALLY*
>> > in an open format, as xml is.
The claim. I disagree with it, but it's a coherent claim. When you're
sharing a document, it's often a Good Thing to be able to exchange the whole
thing as a standalone bundle and not have to worry about broken and relative
links.
>> > just load everything from a directory (like: filename-data/)
>> Church secretaries can't send directories in their email.
*I* can't send directories in my email, either. Not that I'd want to. :-)
>Church secretaries don't use email.
>This argument (for anything that is dump on the developer side) is getting
>tiresome. Yes, some users are stupid. Should we do stupid things? No. That
>is the Microsoft way, that is the way of stupidification.
>
>I don't believe users are stupid.
>A church secretary that used email, probably has it on a modem, and sending
>a more than a few k's file is too much of a pain to do. So she'll print it,
>and send it by snailmail.
Gratuitous insult about church secretaries, who definitely *do* use email.
Everybody uses email. Look around.
>The directory could probably even be a zip file in the style of .war (for
>those that are familiar with servlets).
>
>This could probably mean a change of the file format in such a way:
> a ZIP of a dir containing the xml doc and the files embedded.
>
>This way tou can have:
> 1) a single file (so your stupid church secretaries can think of it as a
>single file)
> 2) a clean xml file easily editable by those that are not so stupid and
>that unzip the file.
> 3) the embedded contents are seprated from the content allowing better
>management.
>
>What do you think?
Uh, I think you've just taken your nice editable directory and made it into
a single zipfile. Forgetting for the moment that this violates your claim
above, is this really that much better than what we currently do in the .abw
file format?
Right now the embedded contents are separated from the text content *inside*
the XML file -- they're base64-encoded in a data block at the bottom. The
rest of the XML file is very editable. Just type.
The only thing that's less editable are the embedded contents, because you
may need to base64-decode them before mucking with them. Is that so bad?
If you want to get rid of the whole thing, you just delete the whole data
item.
Your proposal is different, but I fail to see how it's better.
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Apr 20 2001 - 13:23:38 CDT