Could Open Office provide the ideal, standard, multi-lingual, multi-platform rich text format for Squeak?
From: [...] Darius Could Open Office provide the ideal, standard, multi-lingual, multi-platform rich text format for Squeak?
Well, I don't have it installed on my iPAQ, and I rather doubt Tim has it installed on his Acorn. To my mind, one of the strengths of Squeak is that it *is* as self-contained as it is.
Speaking entirely personally, if I were doing this, I'd go with XHTML + CSS2 for the job - CSS3 if you're feeling adventurous - and try to construct the core of a layout system that could work with CSS features. You can do some pretty effective layout with those, their use is increasing, and we'd get the benefit of a kernel that could then be used for older (and often buggier) HTML. But then, I've been involved with W3C standards, so I guess I'm biased!
- Peter
"Peter Crowther" peter@ozzard.org wrote:
From: [...] Darius Could Open Office provide the ideal, standard, multi-lingual, multi-platform rich text format for Squeak?
Well, I don't have it installed on my iPAQ, and I rather doubt Tim has it installed on his Acorn.
True, though oddly enough the ol'acorn can handle quite a few niche formats of this sort. The folks at Acorn took a very different approach to Apple; they concluded (correctly) that they were going to have to live in a heterogenous world and so made their system friendly to almost all others. Apple took the view that only their stuff was 'real' and made it very difficult to work with other platforms. I suppose that has improved a bit with OSX recently.
I'd say it is an interesting lesson to us; _if_ we want to be able to work with other systems _then_ we need to creat importer and exporter capabilities. Of course, that may not be what we want in life. YMMV.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim Strange OpCodes: JUM: Jeer at User's Mistake
On Dec 31, 2003, at 11:39 AM, Tim Rowledge wrote:
The folks at Acorn took a very different approach to Apple; they concluded (correctly) that they were going to have to live in a heterogenous world and so made their system friendly to almost all others. Apple took the view that only their stuff was 'real' and made it very difficult to work with other platforms. I suppose that has improved a bit with OSX recently.
It has - quite a lot. The use of rtf as the rich text format and the fact that the system text editor widget understands how to read and write it makes it a relatively ubiquitous format on OS X. Furthermore, this is a huge interop plus as MSWord on both Macs and Windows treat rtf files as more or less first class citizens. IOW, when asked for a Word file, I just send rtf that I've edited with TextEdit and nobody seems to notice.
I'd say it is an interesting lesson to us; _if_ we want to be able to work with other systems _then_ we need to creat importer and exporter capabilities. Of course, that may not be what we want in life. YMMV.
Well, Squeak purports to be a multimedia platform. RTF is a pretty common media type.
-Todd Blanchard
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