I was just thinking that it might be useful (and potentially a huge usability increase) to create a facility for using plugins, preferably in Perl (since anyone knows perl) Basically, someone with good knowledge of the abiword document-internals (i.e. a abiword developer) could allow an external program to access those internals. With this in place, a great deal of work could be placed into plugins. HTML import/export is one, plus, it would make extendability by end users possible. Also, since Abiword prides itself on portability, a plugin written in Perl could easily be moved from platform to platform without any functionality issues.
one of GIMP's major selling points has been the plugin interface, I would think a similar interface in AbiWord would definitely increase it's popularity and userbase.
Aubin
-- "being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker more than able able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer." - Eric Raymond--- outlyer@stampede.org http://www.outlyer.org/