From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Sep 04 2002 - 11:35:50 EDT
At 04:51 PM 9/1/02 -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>I've always wondered why we didn't do this, especially since RTF cut
>and paste can be somewhat lossy and RTF export is at minimum 2-pass.
Jeff and I had a few big arguments about this in 98. I thought .ABW format
should be the first thing we got right on the clipboard, but he (quite
rightly) convinced me that doing just .RTF was far more important.
Here's why.
To interoperate with practically every other piece of software out there, we
need *flawless* RTF support. By using RTF as our primary clipboard format,
it draws a ton of attention to any flaws in our RTF impexp logic, since
people cut and paste all the time inside AbiWord.
By contrast, if we'd had ABW format information on the clipboard, then we
probably would have used that as our primary source of information. While
that may have made our own lives easier (at first), it would have had the
following quite negative consequences:
- much less emphasis on improving our RTF support
- interop issues as the ABW file format evolved
It was a counterintuitive argument at first, but in retrospect I'm
*incredibly* glad that I lost that argument. Jeff sure is a smart guy. :-)
>This wouldn't be too hard to do, so I might do this in the next few
>days. I'll update every importer and exporter (hopefully) so that it
>can handle clipboard data trivially.
No, it wouldn't be too hard, but for the reasons listed above, I'd
*strongly* suggest that we stick with RTF as our primary clipboard format.
Ideally on a permanent basis, but certainly until we shake out every
possible corner case for table impexp.
Paul
motto -- code that gets used gets tested
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