Re: [office-comment] Re: Unit system tracking

[Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org>]

On Monday 11 June 2007 20:44:50 Alex Hudson wrote:
> I think that's a bit of a hostage to fortune: essentially, we're
> talking about typed data (in CS-speak), and if the other side isn't
> typed then automated conversion into the typed format is obviously
> impossible. But, I don't see why you'd attempt that - e.g., ODF doesn't
> ask people to up-convert tables into page columns when they're used for
> layout. The typed stuff is extra mojo on top. While it doesn't aid
> conversion, I don't see that it hampers it.

This kind of indicates what I've been thinking in this thread; the ODf 
spec is the wrong place to add this feature. The implementations should 
add this feature in the applications and when they find out that just 
using the display-value of a cell is not enough to _store_ the data 
lossless then we need to extend ODF.
In other words; people enter values in the GUI, not by altering the ODF 
file so any auto conversions and warnings etc all have to be done there.

So, lets keep working top down where the application developers invent the 
new features instead of bottom up where we design them (by committee?).

I'll forward some more good emails from this thread to the koffice-devel 
mailinglist to make the koffice/kspread people aware of the issues and 
ideas.
-- 
Thomas Zander

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