From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 13 2003 - 17:59:35 EDT
> > We're remarkably unlikely to ever make the SXW
> format
> > the default one. If we were to change, it would
> make
> > much more sense for us to make DOC/RTF the default
> > one, quite honestly.
> Interesting. May I ask you why? Do they match better
> the internal data
> representation?
RTF matches our internal data representation much
better, and our file filters for RTF are much more
advanced than our Oasis ones (we use RTF for cut+paste
with the clipboard, and this needs to be flawless).
But besides that, maybe 1-2 million people use
OpenOffice on any sort of regular basis. Maybe 1-2
billion people use Microsoft Word. And those MSWord
users can't possibly import Oasis documents, nor is
Microsoft likely to add such functionality.
OpenOffice, however, is quite good at reading DOC and
RTF files. So if we use DOC or RTF as our default
format, all of the OpenOffice and MS Office people
could read our documents.
One of our aims is to inter-operate seamlessly with
the other software on the market. So if we wanted to
change the default file format, we'd *probably* choose
one that everyone already uses. But we have no
ambition of changing our default file format. It's
already user-configurable, and that's about as far as
I'm willing to go.
> This goes without saying, but also prompts me to ask
> what you mean by
> data loss: formatting or structure? And would it
> happen because, in
> some way, the OASIS format is less advanced than
> ABW's or why?
Well, we have finite amounts of time and ambition.
There are bound to be flaws in our conversion to/from
any file format that is != our native ABW format. Plus
some of our features don't map cleanly (or at all) to
the Oasis specification (or any other SPEC, for that
matter). The same thing goes for OpenOffice - whenver
you save something in DOC/RTF and then close, it pops
up an annoying dialog saying something similar to
"saving in anything but the SXW format can cause
dataloss. do you want to exit anyway?" We don't want
to make that our *default* case.
> Thanks again to you all for your time and patience.
Not a problem.
Cheers,
Dom
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