The thing to do is probably to follow Gnome's lead and use the DOM (follow
links from W3C web site). Since this is also used by Mozilla, and it has
ECMAScript/JavaScript bindings, and it will be used by the Gnome office
suite...
It has CORBA bindings too so you get all scripting languages, and you
don't have to decide.
For those who don't know, basically it is just an API for accessing
tree-structure (XML) data. An AbiWord document can already be represented
this way obviously, given the file format. The program's internal
representation does not have to be a tree though.
Last I heard it seemed Gnome might modify the standard DOM slightly, to
allow a nicer implementation, but Abi* would not have to do that
necessarily.
Gnumeric even has multiple scripting language bindings without using DOM;
clearly if you're going to write part of the software in a scripting
language you have to privilege that language, but if scripting is only for
plugins and extensions, there is no real point in selecting a particular
one.
</evangelism>
> We're going to keep dragging our feet on the scripting and
> macros issue. There doesn't seem to be much urgency about
> this issue right now.
>
However I agree 100% here, keep focused and finish a nice program first.
FWIW,
Havoc