From: Omer Zak (omerz@actcom.co.il)
Date: Wed Jan 22 2003 - 03:23:54 EST
On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Robert G. Werner wrote:
> Please don't feel that I was hostile to your idea.I just saw Emacs,
> Guile,and Scheme, and saw a perfect (IMHO) opertunity to be a
> smart-ass.
Welcome to the club of smart-asses. You are member #2, after me. :-)
> ... My only real objection to programing my Word Processor is
> embedding macros in the documents and thus opening up the possiblity
> of Macro Viruses like MS did in the mid ninetys.
I agree that this is a big risk of improperly-designed macro/scripting
mechanism.
I wonder if it is possible to reduce the risk (taking into account human
behavior and social engineering issues) by clean separation between
documents and scripts. How do we define templates so that they'll be
safe (social engineering-wise)?
The point is that people can be educated to be careful at E-mailing
executable stuff to each other (such as AbiWord scripts). On the other
hand, documents should be 100% safe to E-mail. Templates fall in the
middle, and if improperly designed, some busy consultant might E-mail a
template to his associates for the content, rather than for helping them
build their own documents from the template.
Can we design a template mechanism so that templates and scripts, which
operate on them, will be in different files? (Mail/merge can be
implemented as script or a plugin. This distinction is one of detail, not
one of principle.)
Then, templates by themselves will not be capable of evoking automatic
actions by AbiWord - for this the user will need to apply a plugin or a
script.
--- Omer
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