Opera CTO Hits Back at Microsoft's Standards Push 246
Michael writes "Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie hit back today at Microsoft's push to fast track Office Open XML into an ISO standard, in a
blistering article on CNET. He also took a swipe at Open Document Format: 'I'm no fan of either specification. Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them. If forced to choose one, I'd pick the 700-page specification (ODF) over the 6,000-page specification (OOXML). But I think there is a better way.' The better way being the existing universally understood standards of HTML and CSS. Putting this to the test, Håkon has published a book using HTML and CSS."
Yes. Well... (Score:3, Funny)
Ok... Cheese, anyone?
fsck'n ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't typeset with Microsoft Word, either. Which makes the entire argument specious. Word processors like MS Word and OOo Writer are for creating common documents like letters, memos, and maybe the occasional flyer. Neither one is particularly good at anything even close to professional publishing work. Even the book authors just use Word (or surprisingly, OOo Writer!) to do the text content. That text is then exported to a more sophisticated program, where the actual typesetting and page layouts are done.
I think this fellow's point is that HTML/CSS formats can store any information that a Word Processor might need to store, with no need to invoke new technologies. To a certain extent, he may be correct. Unfortunately, HTML/CSS may make a good intermediary format, but it is not particularly good from a performance or usability perspective. Then again, XML formats in general are fairly poor choices for the same reason.
I think if we want to break this conundrum, the industry is going to have to learn how to keep local data stores that are of high performance, while exporting intermediary formats when emailing or uploading to external computers. The only problem is finding a way of doing this so that it's completely transparent to users. The mythical "mom" doesn't want to worry about emailing a document in the right format, or having the right program to read the attachment she received. She just wants it to do what she tells it, with no bloody prompting with questions she has no answers for.
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-too many versions of html (4, and perhaps 5 soon) and xhtml (1.0, 1.1, strict, transitional, etc)
-different versions of CSS, browser support for it varies quite a bit (and is pretty much non-existent for CSS3)
-too many render
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:5, Informative)
This would have to be done by the tool displaying it, same as a self-updating TOC in a Word or OpenOffice Writer document. The information is present in a correctly-structured HTML document in the form of Hx tags.
Hell, how can you even tell the page numbers in a html "document" anyways?
The same way you would in a Word document. It doesn't make sense if you're looking at it as a web page in your browser, but if your editor used HTML it would work the same way. (This also partially alleviates the rendering issues.)
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
- position an image on page 4 of my document?
- add footnotes?
- embed fields (date, last editor...)?
- mark the embedded TOC as TOC so that it gets regenerated on reload?
etc.
And on the CSS side, there are quite a lot of shortcomings, too.
Of course, all of this would work with custom XML tags or special id/class conventions, BUT then you'd have to specify those. And getting this below 700 pages won't be easy.
So repeat after me:
HTML is *not* a description language suitable for word processing in its current state, and it is unclear it can be made so without sacrificing device indepence.
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:5, Interesting)
I just dug out the template I wrote, and the pagination and ToC worked fine in Safari. The auto-numbering of headers, however, didn't. This is due to a lack of support for counters in generated content, and the same problem with Mozilla was a significant reason for abandoning the whole idea in the first place; the only browser everything worked in was Opera.
Another significant reason for abandoning this idea (not entirely relevant when talking about document formats being generated by tools) was that HTML is a huge pain to type, and XHTML is even worse. Something semantically equivalent to XHTML but using S-expressions would have been fine, but typing XHTML just involves spending far too much time hitting > and < keys (not to mention the redundancy of close tags having the full tag name). I turned to LaTeX, which is easier to type and also (being a Turing-complete programming language) much easier to extend than HTML.
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:5, Informative)
- position an image on page 4 of my document?
You don't, nor do you want to. But you can anchor, float or bind the images to the text easily enough. This would be handled by css... for the HTML side, it would just be div and object tags --- not that you would ever see them, since this is an word app.
<p class="footnote">My footnote</p> with the appropriate CSS rule (presumably something like float: page or whatever.)
Using XML entities, presumably
Regenerated on reload? Come on, have some ambition.. it should be in sync at all times. Anyway, by keeping tracks of the header tags, presumably.
XHTML+CSS would need some expansions... but probably not much. A good layout program propably doesn't care about the device, but if it did, there are already @media tags to handle this situations. There are also a couple of other truly dedicated layout namespaces on w3 to consider.
But all this matters not. This is politics. Sadly.
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:4, Insightful)
Footnotes are easy, too: Text Text that needs a footnote.<div class="footnote">This is the footnote</div>. That's the same concept as in LaTeX, the best typesetting software out there.
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The M in HTML stands for MARKUP. And it means it. HTML is NOT a layout language.
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I think that's why he says HTML/CSS. HTML ta
Re:fsck'n ugly (Score:4, Insightful)
No offense, but I'm getting sick of this line of reasoning. You're right, mom wants the computer to read her thoughts, know exactly what she really meant when she said X, anticipate every need she might have, and pre-calculate its complexity out of existence.
In other news, my boss would like this entire website built in one hour ($40), never need support, and scale to 300,000 users.
At a certain point IT's job goes from "give every user what heshe wants" to "educate users about what is feasible in the current technological situation.
Classic quote for the books, gotta love XML play (Score:5, Insightful)
indeed (Score:2)
...and sig'd in tribute.
Even more classic perhaps, 'The "layer" element?!' Sure raised my eyebrow; a huge change from "Netscape engineers are weenies!" by any metric. :)
Is it mature enough? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a latex junkie. Latex though is a PITA to create templates and styles for. Someone willing to take up the task to modernize latex or completely replace it?
Re:Is it mature enough? (Score:5, Informative)
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For example, it cannot produce print and HTML versions of the same document. This may not matter to everyone, but it was something I needed, so I stuck to Latex.
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I'm not writing a book any time soon, and if I were I wouldn't take this approach, but it is an interesting read.
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Being in control of the layout and setting is very important if you value your creation at all.
Tom
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For me, I write my user manuals [for my FL/OSS projects] in LaTeX because the layout is much better, and the process much simpler than wrestling with a word processor.
Why anyone writes books in anything else is beyond me.
My first book [math text] that was published was all LaTeX, and while it wasn't all super simple the vast majority of the layout and setting work was handled by TeX itself. My second b
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Why anyone writes books in anything else is beyond me.
I couldn't agree more. I am currently writing a book, and I can't imagine how people use tools like Word. It has a lot of technical content, particularly code snippets. With LaTeX, I can easily insert a few lines from a code file, and have it automatically syntax highlighted. I never have to worry about copy-and-paste errors, since the source code is included directly from the source files, which I can compile and test.
I can also define short commands like \code{} for inline code snippets (e.g. variab
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All of these are problems with browsers, not the actual file format. What's
Re:Is it mature enough? (Score:4, Informative)
Tables shouldn't be used for page layout -- that's what CSS is for. It's as simple as that.
Re:Is it mature enough? (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, the fact that he used a program called Prince to generate a reasonably professional-looking "book" [opera.com]. Not "printed web page". Book.
Funny, he didn't mention that he "wrote" the book in HTML, just that he "published" it in HTML.
"It is now possible, even feasible, to use HTML as the document format for books." (Granted, that's two links off the
huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Uhm. I'm no expert, but isn't a book that uses HTML and CSS called a website?
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
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If they spelled everything out without any ambiguity it would make a better standard.. but then it would be another "600 page long" standard with is what he seems to be against in the first place.
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A document doesn't turn into a physical book until you hit print. The book itself is about the content, not the physical form. Dive into Python [diveintopython.org] is a book that I just happened to read online in web page form.
CSS for Documents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a word processor act more like a web browser would be awesome. Ever since I started using word processors (which for me was a long time after I started using web browsers), i've always thought, why doesn't updating this style make all text with that style update? Why do I always have to change the same thing over and over again?
While turning word processors into web browsers would be stupid, things like CSS would be awesome to have in word processors.
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The proper term is (Score:2)
WordPerfect on Linux [linuxmafia.com]
Re:CSS for Documents? (Score:4, Informative)
Such things exist. TeX provides a decent the base for such things, so it's a matter of finding a TeX centric editor. LyX would be a good example, and indeed it has the sort of functionality and general approach to document creation that you seem to be after. Of course it doesn't necessarily have all the other features that other word processors might have (like mail merge or what have you).
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Lyx provides a GUI front end, but you lose a lot of flexibility.
Texmacs might work for you as well, although I found it very clunky.
Re:CSS for Documents? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am finding myself wishing that OpenOffice had pursued putting a vastly better interface on TeX and LaTeX, rather than writing their own standard. It would probably have been faster and certainly would have been a lot more stable. Microsoft couldn't have even thought about it: its clean, open standards would not have lent themselves to the proprietary "extend" part of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" approach, or Microsoft's software licensing models.
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This stuff needs to work
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But it is tricky to use for any language other than English. Out of the box, it's English or nothing. Other European languages are complicated; more complex languages like Arabic, Hindi, or Chinese require some very involved hacks indeed.
It can be done, some of the time, but it's very, very easy to mess up. I have tried numerous times to get Japanese support, using one of the several special Japanese versions that exist (it seems it simply can't be done with standard TeX
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Take a look at XeTeX [sil.org]. It installed without a hitch on my computer (ppc debian) once I altered the Debian control stuff to compile against the TeXLive TeX packages rather than teTeX. Or if you run on a more normal platform (x86 ubuntu/debian/SuSE, MacOS X, maybe Windows) there's precompiled packages for you. It will use any OpenType (or TTF, or on OSX th
Latex here and now? (Score:2)
However, I think the parent post's main point was that LaTeX is not here and now usable across the globe. With MS Word or OpenOffice, I can type and mix Japanese, Korean, Russian and French in one and the same document, and I can share it with millions of users on different platforms.
With the default installations of LaTeX, that is impossible.
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I'm sure that will be useful for many of us (even though the installation failed for me).
I suppose the regular disclaimers like "make sure you have all the dependencies installed" apply. It's a pity GNU/Linux distributions are st
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But it is tricky to use for any language other than English. Out of the box, it's English or nothing. Other European languages are complicated; more complex languages like Arabic, Hindi, or Chinese require some very involved hacks indeed.
Really? All of my LaTeX files are UTF-8, and most include some non-English characters. I tend to use the raw unicode, rather than the LaTeX sequences because they are easier to type on a Mac. I'm not using a custom version of LaTeX although I vaguely remember having to include a package that told LaTeX to use UTF-8. Things like Greek letters and accents just work. I've not tried Arabic, Hindi or Kanji, however.
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I did it this was so that I could also do a print [amazon.co.uk] version [amazon.com] from the same source document.
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I've been doing this since Word 6.0, when I first used a GUI wordprocessor. Stylesheets aren't by any means a new thing: They're just one
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The idea of styles didn't orginate in CSS, it was used in page layout decades before the web. I use Ventura, which features this heavily, but PageMaker, Quark, etc all have styles.
And actually, Word does too, but using styles correctly in Word is fraught with difficulty. The method of updating styles is capricious. I do DTP for a living, and when
Re:CSS for Documents? (Score:4, Insightful)
Every word processor I've seen like forever has support for styles. The problem is:
1) It's impossible to avoid creating a million new styles by accident. Try looking at the styles list and you'll see it's full of junk
2) It's impossible to clean up a document with such a bunch of styles, for example say you have a document which has been completely fucked up with pseudo-styles. You've set "Normal" to be what the bulk text should be, and "Headings" to what they should be. What happened last time I tried it? Well, it was impossible to easily apply it without killing any bullet lists, bold, italics or any other intended variation of the normal text. Headers and numbering went beserk. Trying to do the same with the bullet list style lead to numbers going completely nutzoid, for some reason it thought everyone in the same style belonged to the same list so later lists would start at some random number.
3) If you for some reason is stuck copying between different versions of Word (norwegian and english comes to mind) then you'll have double the number of styles, which obviously aren't in synch.
So to sum it up what I would like:
1) Don't auto-create styles
2) This sentence does not contain three styles
3) Sane "apply style" functions
- Parituclary directed at fixing a mess
4) Make styles have an ID, at least for the default ones make them international so header 1 is header 1 in every language
5) Ability to "style-lock" documents for things like company standards, you can create new styles but not just randomly change around sizes and fonts
6) More visible styles (OpenOffice does this, MS word doesn't) because people don't see them
Re:CSS for Documents? (Score:4, Insightful)
Word DOS (version 4 at least) had it back almost 20 years ago. And actually it was much easier to use styles back in the DOS version. Current versions try so hard to second guess you in the quest for user-friendliness and layering features on top of features that you can change or create new styles without knowing or intending to. Old-school required you to RTFA, but then you could use styles very efficiently. Now styles are much more sophisticated, but hardly anyone uses them correctly. I get docuements from all kinds of people, including many university lecturers. None, out of hundreds over the last 15 years, has had a clue of how to style their documents. Headings are "Normal" with font commands to make them large; body text is "Heading 1" converted to 12-point Times; bulleted and numbered lists are a minefield, tables are a quagmire of hacks, spaces and tabs, etc...
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I don't know that I agree completely (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it works, with enough tweaking, and CSS3, and a $350 download of a product to turn HTML/CSS3 into a PDF. This is better how? What about LyX, LaTeX, or even OpenOffice if you are just going to convert to PDF?
The whole HTML/CSS-to-print thing shoots the real argument in the foot.
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Yes, exactly. Instead of taking one of two specifications created just for rich document formats, he suggests making a brand new specification by extending CSS/HTML to do something it doesn't yet seem ready to do.
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Yes, exactly. Instead of taking one of two specifications created just for rich document formats, he suggests making a brand new specification by extending CSS/HTML to do something it doesn't yet seem ready to do.
This talk of not creating new standards is ludicrous: there are already existing XML schemes geared towards this sort of task. Why should HTML/CSS be extended for publishing non-web documents when the work's already been done elsewhere? It gets even more ridiculous when you stop to think about a
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But it hardly takes a $350 tool to handle: PDFcreator, available over at sourceforge.net, and the old Ghostview viewer both rely on Ghostscript to process PDF and work more quickly and reliably than Adobe's conversion tools,
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PostScript (and PDF) have the adobe problem, but there is a better format that doesn't: DVI (the device independent format created by Donald Knuth).
The DVI format doesn't even have the capability to include bitmap images. LaTeX cheats and uses the comment section to point to an external encapsulated postscript file. dvips will read this and include the EPS, and so will some DVI viewers but this can lead to all sorts of hard-to-track-down bugs. I ditched latex for pdflatex a while ago, and haven't looked back.
Re:I don't know that I agree completely (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe because, surprising as it may be, part of what he says makes a lot of sense. I completely agree with him that the two proposed "standards" are both complete crap. And I also agree that HTML/CSS combination has, in principle, a lot of merit.
A good portable document format should not have anything about internal representation of the document in the memory, neither it should any specific software, or even a specific version of such software, be ment
I don't think he gets it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Somehow I don't think that's going to fix the problem. Oh, and pointing out that the Microsoft letter doesn't validate. Isn't that a little petty?
Validation is relevant (Score:3, Insightful)
But if the Oasis pages did validate, the basic argument goes like this: "How can they claim to care about standards if they can't even bother to support that most universal standard of standards, HTML?" And indeed, I could still make that argument -- just look at the sad, sad state of affairs that is Internet Explorer's CSS [mis]handling.
He gets it. (Score:2)
>
> Somehow I don't think that's going to fix the problem.
Depends on what you define the problem as. That there is too many "standards", or that all of them sucks. If the later, defining a new standard that does not suck solves the problem.
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To anyone who doesn't think XHTML/CSS sucks, look up how many ways there are of saying 'red' in CSS. I was implementing a partial CSS parser a while back, and the specification seems to have been written by document authors with no thought to implementers.
How come? (Score:5, Funny)
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Besides, how often is a human planning on parsing the files manually? If you ask me, the only purpose these open document file formats serve is to be opened by other word processors, which means as long as its standardized it could probably look like Chinese and it wouldn't phase me in the least.
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I don't think he was evaluating the strenghs and weaknesses by their size. He plainly said both standards suck, regardless of their size. Given that, if forced to choose which one to implement, it makes more sense to suffer through a "mere" 700 pages instead of 6000.
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Well, the basic parser isn't really an issue. I haven't investigated either standard in any detail, but assuming they're actual XML, or even reasonably close, there are a million libraries that can handle the parsing. Expat, Xerces, Arabica, the Qt XML parser, and the Java library XML parser come to mind.
The majority of the work is interpretting the tags and actually laying out the document in a standardized way.
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My speculation would be that no-one wants to sit and read a 6,000 page specification. 700 pages is far more palletable.
It's a crap way of judging the relative merits of specifications, but human nature will out.
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Yep. You could certainly fit almost nine times as many on a standard pallet.
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You don't need to. The only people who read entire specifications are their authors and the standards bodies. As a designer, you only care about the parts of the specification that you are responsible for implementing.
ODF is unfortunately rather incomplete in some areas. There are no specifications for which spreadsheet formulas have to be implemented, or how they are implemented. Tables ar
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Re:How come? (Score:5, Informative)
Since nobody gets it, I'll spoil it: That's how Håkon advises people to pronounce his name. It's even on his business card.
Is there a FOSS way to make PDF from XHTML/CSS? (Score:2)
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An example of the HTMLDOC specific code used in the conversion
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Can != Should (Score:3, Insightful)
HTML + CSS vs. Word vs. OO.o seems to me to be an argument related to formatting documents, not a "book". It's not that you couldn't do it, but I'd consider using Quark or InDesign (what seems to be Adobe's successor to PageMaker) or even Tex and its variants (haven't used any Tex-based stuff, but heard wonderful things) for typesetting.
Arguments about standards aside, proof of concepts aside, I'd think that the real issue when it comes to any job is using the best tool for it. It's not a question of whether you can use these tools to typeset a book, but if you should.
The point of the proof of concept is to prove that the system is flexible or capable enough to go beyond its original intended use. I get that. But proving a chainsaw can be used to spread butter, doesn't mean it's inherently superior to a coping saw.
- Greg
to kill a mockingstandard (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not HTML for books? (Score:2, Insightful)
fonts (Score:3, Informative)
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With Flash and PDF you can do a lot more, but obviously authoring becomes a problem.
Well, maybe. Have you ever looked at font licenses? There are more than a few digital type foundries using licenses that expressly prohibit embedding outlines of the glyphs in other files. This is because the outlines of the glyphs (mathematically represented by the font software) are the one part of the font that's actually copyrightable; the actual glyphs themselves are not (this is why so many foundries have their own
Too true (Score:4, Insightful)
I wrote my thesis book this way (Score:3, Informative)
http://software-libre.rudd-o.com/ [rudd-o.com]
Used MediaWiki to write the chapters, wrote a small python proggie (available there) to consolidate the wiki into a single HTML file (mostly conforming to the Boom! microformat), then used Prince and Hakom's book CSS to generate the PDF.
Great typesetting, collaborative book editing, screw LaTeX!
Hakom was right.
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Those who don't understand LaTeX are doomed to reinvent it... poorly.
Maybe... (Score:2)
If Html+Css offered a better model instead of the box model (example the point-line model) and offered some way of doing basic data structures I'd agree. The current box model is very limiting in its layout abilities.
Modern documents have so many binary data types inserted in them (images, fonts, etc.) that Html+Css isn't enough. It isn't even enough on the web and that's why Javascript and Flash are so prevalent. There needs to be another specification to support all the needs/wants of the users (who are
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Firefox and Opera (iirc) both support base64 encoded binary data being stuffed inside img src. I cant remember if IE supports it or not, or if its in the actual standard though. Not that I agree with using html for typesetting.
ODF a memory dump of OOo? (Score:2)
Recently I hear a criticism of ODF by Miguel de Icaza is that ODF doesn't reuse standards like SVG as much as it should..
Open Office Herecy (sold here) (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, ODF it kind of blows. Really.
I write novel-length "books" and it is FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE to do some very basic things in any/every ODF based word processor I have tried to date.
Exercise for the Interested:
Make a "Book" with an automatic table of contents, said table to contain an "Authors Note", "Prologue", auto-numbered chapters 1 to N with their associated chapter titles (where the actual chapter number is the chapter number internal variable), and finally "Epilogue" all at the same level of the index.
This simple task is essentially impossible. The flaw is caused by the fact that everything goes through the "styles" and the styles don't inherit their list membership properties. You should be able to make a style "TOC Entry" that is assigned to a particular table of contents level (e.g. level 1) then make a sub-style "Chapter Heading" based on "TOC Entry" but with the chapter numbering magic attached, and in so doing, create "different styles" that go to the same level/point in the list.
Exercise for the Interested:
Make a "Book" with each chapter, and the prolog, and the epilog in separate sub documents. The linkage thing is a mess, it is hard to move "the pile of files" around especially if you want to use subdirectories (etc). If you have a custom style in the master document style list you have to _USE_ it in the master document if you want it to be pushed into the created sub-documents. Once the sub-documents are created it is a royal pain (read effectively impossible, or "supremely hidden feature required") to update those styles in those sub documents if you change that style.
Exercise for the Interested:
Put three separate "outlines" into one ODF Document. In ODF the outline is a function of the style headers, they only exist as implications of structure instead of first class abstractions. This is largely the fault of Microsoft Word, since the Word folks totally messed this up when they supplanted WordPerfect (which did this inset outline/object sort of thing right).
ODF was, IMHO, poisoned by the slavish attempt by someone trying to make a Word killer instead of a "good word processor."
And there are stacks more of these issues.
And all that said, I *STILL* use ODF (Open Office etc) because I CATEGORICALLY REFUSE to _RENT_ the right to access my own work from a third party. Microsoft has plainly stated that such rental model is their intended business plan, which makes them a non-starter.
In my opinion, having used both Word and OpenOffice for years; and having used Word Perfect and wordstar before them, ODF is a "workman like effort" to create a document format suitable for "normal business purposes". There is a reason that the legal profession never moved over to Word, and they likewise will not move to ODF, when you need to get to a tightly proscribed document format, both Word and ODF have a "you can't get there from here" fundamental limitation. Both formats simply refuse to represent some things because the designers "know" that a different format is better. Neither ODF nor Word has any allowances for _art_, professional or poetical.
So, governments should use ODF because it is "no worse" than Word in terms of the ability to represent the documents it can represent, and given that congruence, the shorter, 100% open standard is, or should be, a hard minimum requirements.
In terms of ODF being the be-all and end-all of document representation, I'd have to say "hardly!" I looked into the OpenOffice code base a while back to see if adding/changing the format to allow for "a book" would be reasonable. It didn't appear to be. Too many of the original StarOffice assumptions about document structure seemed pathologically uninspired. It was like looking at a big pile of Visual Basic. Everything in the standard is way too global, nothing "nests organically" it all nests pedagogically. (Every
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Insightful comments, I've rarely heard the argument made so well. You obviously ARE a writer. ("Renting the right to access your documents", great way to put it.)
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Uh, just an FYI. The legal profession uses MS Word. For years they did keep to Word Perfect in the USA, and of the 20 lawyer friend of mine at Tier 1 USA law firms, they all use MS Word. Word Perfect died for the legal profession when it failed to create
You're using the wrong tool. (Score:4, Insightful)
Google docs (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyways sounds like a good idea to me. I often have to share documents and I don't like to have to force people to install a specific application just to read them.
Um... NO (Score:5, Informative)
OK, then here's a challenge for the Opera CEO (Score:2)
Actually, I have every confidence that Opera can. . . I've been a happy Opera user since 1999.
Why is this an issue? (Score:2)
A standard is going to limit innovation in word processors unless you specifically allow extensions in the standard, which kind of defeats the purpose of a standard.
If the go
Compilation (Score:2)
"That's the reason I'd wish to add a third"
I wish he didn't ruin the entire opinion with all those html/css pipe dreams, they are so extremely unrealistic besides of all the mess that would actually be to adapt them in a useful way for office formats. Really this was kind of a shame.
I could also write a book in
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I publish a PDF magazine [justthings.info], I wouldn't use anything except Scribus to lay it out. I'm considering a print-CSS version, but I'm confused why anyone would make a print-CSS version and then convert it to PDF. To me, this seems to miss the point of both formats.