things lacking in Squeak

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Dec 16 18:52:55 UTC 2003


Duane Maxwell <dmaxwell at san.rr.com> wrote:
> RTF is about the closest thing to a universally recognized rich text  
> format.  Virtually every word processor reads and writes it, and there  
> are libraries for most programming languages available.  Mac OS X uses  
> RTF as its primary rich text format - it's what's generated by  
> TextEdit, and Cocoa has an API for using it.
> 
> It's very well documented, though I think that there are few complete  
> implementations. Format specification is here:
> 
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ 
> dnrtfspec/html/rtfspec.asp
> 

The last time I played with RTF was a few years ago, but it was a bad
experience.  I went on a jihad asking everynoe to use RTF, because it
seemed like such a nice solution to the problem of portable word
processing formats.  However, it didn't work out.  People sent me RTF's
that none of my tools could could read.  The problem was that RTF files
generated by MS tools tended to included MS-specific objects in them. 
You'd be going through the file and see messages along the lines of
"unparsable object  excel210413".

Has this situation really changed?  If not, then we can never expect to
reliably import RTF.  We can export stuff that is strictly conformant,
but  there are many of the existing tools that export stuff we will not
be able to read.

To contrast, there are plenty of open formats around, many of which are
older and better established than RTF.  For word processing, there is
TeX, SGML, HTML, and gee, plain old TEXT.  For output, there is PDF,
PNG, and JPEG.  For Squeak-to-Squeak interchange, you can't beat project
files.  These are all formats that we can definitely read.

Further, there are plenty of non-technical reasons to avoid things under
MS's sponsorship and control.  At any time MS may pull the plug and
start emiting non-standard content, and they already have a long history
of doing it!  MS does not play nice, and we should stay as much out of
their power as possible.  Imagine if we do try to standardize on RTF,
and MS yet again turns the tables and emits something we cannot parse. 
Imagine lobbying Microsoft to get something fixed, and being powerless
to fix it ourselves.  Yuck!!

I'm astounded to learn that MacOS X is using this format widely.  Is it
true?  Are you sure it's the same "rich text format" that MS has been
pushing?  It certainly cannot be the exact some content, since MS RTF is
(or used tobe) unreadable without using MS code.  I would have expected
the situation more as, "Microsoft is emiting this junk, so we had better
do our best to support it".

In summary, I could see that it would be nice for Squeak to make a best
effort to parse RTF if we are presented with it.  But let's be very
careful along these lines.  We do not want to get people in the habit of
sending us RTF files.  We do not want to post RTF's on any of the Squeak
web sites.  We do not want to complacently ignore it if some group
starts posting RTF's that they expect the world to be able to read.


-Lex



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