On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Dirk A. Mueller wrote:

| We've agreed on using .desktop files already, we're trying to get a
| common window manager standard done and a common (or at least
| exchangable) file format for office apps would be the next step. 

bingo!

prepare for dep philosophical rant number one, which follows 
immediately:

a year ago i did a survey of word processors for X, concentrating on 
the open-source stuff, and what i found was about a dozen of them, 
usually half-finished and each with some proprietary file format that, 
while often allowing export through rtf or somesuch, was incapable of 
even dreaming of handing off a complex document to someone else. this 
included, too, the word processors that were part of some real or 
imagined suite.

the reason winword has swept the dosrivative world is that nobody else 
bothered to establish a standard. now, word processors on that side of 
the planet either read/write winword files -- something microsoft goes 
to pains to make difficult -- or they fail.

in linux, we have, still, the group of half-finished standalone word 
processors, some but not all unchanged in the year since i did my 
survey. some of them show great promise, but they will go nowhere 
because of the goofy proprietary file format.

kde is at a point where it will soon have not just the most often 
installed desktop in the linux world but also the most often installed 
office suite. kde2 will be the standard because when people install 
linux, kde2 will be what the boot to linux brings them. additionally, 
there has been an enormous amount of thought put into koffice's 
iteration of xml. it's a good format (albeit a little code-heavy). and 
it will become something of a defacto standard through sheer number of 
installed units.

there is much to be said for pointing this out outside of the kde 
community and offering whatever aid can be offered to developers of 
other applications such that they can be made compliant. this 
specification can do much to extend the influence not just of kde but 
of linux in general. kde has tremendous power to do this, which if 
applied, not in a bullying, microsoftish fashion but instead 
judiciously, can do tremendous good.

here endeth the tirade.<g>

-- 
dep
--
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