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List:       openoffice-discuss
Subject:    File format compatibility in OOo2?
From:       Marco Fioretti <m.fioretti () inwind ! it>
Date:       2002-12-11 19:37:08
Message-ID: 20021211193708.GA950 () inwind ! it
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On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 08:16:45 at 08:16:45AM -0500, Sepehr Kiani (skiani@alum.mit.edu) wrote:
[snip]
> files. The 1.x branch is supposed to not change the file definition, 
> i.e. 1.5 file will open in 1.0 etc.
[snip]

What about 1.x versus 2.x? Regardless of when we will have it, I would
give for granted that OOo 1.x *will* read/write files created with OOo
2.x, right? In other words, 1.x would miss/not see/not use any new
feature introduced by OOo 2, but it *would* open the file anyway, and
display everything that already existed in 1.x (just like a browser of
two years ago would not understand DHTML, but still display forms,
table, headers, links.... in an HTML document created today).

What are the plans for that?

The obvious reason for such a concern is that Free (as in speech) SW
can be also free as free beer, but hardware (and often even
bandwidth) cannot. We are not going to see a day when somebody says "I
run OOo2 which rewrote the file format just because, so you must buy a
more powerful PC/more RAM/whatever just to open my attachments", are
we?

Of course, it would be entirely different and worth it if the reason
to break backward file format compatibility were THE right one: "a
new, open, Free format has been developed, and all Free office suites
(OOo, KOffice, Abiword, <add_your_favourite_here> committed to support
it in their new versions as _the_ default format".

	Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti

Red Hat 8.0 for low memory: www.rule-project.org/en/ 

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