Subject: Topic: Tables and 1.0
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Wed May 02 2001 - 01:12:22 CDT
paul> Tables are slightly more plausible, but in practice they tend to
paul> be very hard to use. (By comparison, styles are much easier to
paul> implement and use, but most people don't use them either.)
paul> Think about the UI choices a user faces when they want to create
paul> simple tabular data.
[etc...]
Sorry, but I can't read this any other way than rationalizing: "tables
are hard to implement and therefore users don't really want them as
much as you say they do".
If tables were hard to use, I don't think the overwhelming majority of
business documents that come my way would be full of them. In fact, I
seldom see a business document that isn't chock full of tables. I'd
go further and say that my experience directly contradicts your
example: most people really don't understand what style sheets are
all about and give up before figuring it out. They may be easier to
implement, but the whole notion of them is foreign.
On the other hand, those tables are everywhere in business documents,
so they're either easy enough to use or important enough that people
perservere. (I seriously don't understand the characterization of
"hard to use". Of things you could plausibly call "advanced", tables
are among the easiest to do, even in a monster like MSWord.)
So, according to your description, AbiWord can get by for a while
without footnotes and citations, because they're only important to
mostly the academic audience. By extension and with my elaboration,
AbiWord can get by for a while without tables because they're only
important to mostly the business user audience.
The proposed "1.0" release stands a good chance of being regarded as a
well-done "toy" program to those audiences. That's the way I view it
when I have my business hat on. Even if I had the sole discretion to
do so, I couldn't convert my business colleagues to using an extremely
stable version of AbiWord that has approximately the feature set it
has today, no matter what release number you call it. By stamping it
"1.0", you will be saying to a lot of people, "This is approximately
what we think it should be", from which they will infer that it is a
word processor good for writing letters, chapters of novels,
non-technical essays, etc. In other words, things with limited
formatting challenges. In other words, a free (as in speech) and
somewhat better WordPad.
The socks will stay on.
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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