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Subject: Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] The importance to users of documents looking the same


On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 4:15 PM, David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/6/20 Sander Marechal <sander.marechal@tribal-im.com>:
>
> Yes. As far as the user is concerned, the layout is part of the document.
>
> You can tell users "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, YOU'RE WRONG TO CARE" but
> it won't make them not care.
>
>
>> Along comes application Bar and it renders differently. Now the heading
>> would be rendered halway down a page, or near the top. Because of the
>> manual page-break you now have a nearly empty page in your document. Ugly...
>
>
> Yes. Saying "what are you worrying about, all the words are there" is
> grossly missing the point. The user cares, and it's a relevant part of
> interoperability. It's not the whole of interoperability, but it's not
> none of it.

I agree that some users will never be satisfied until the round-trip
is pixel perfect.

On the other hand, there is a quite different user requirement for ODF
content that is not pix-perfect, that is easily transformable to other
formats for content recycling purposes. The inability of ODF to
fulfill that requirement along with the inability to integrate ODF
apps with business processes already locked into to Microsoft Office
plus the inability of ODF apps to interoperate are the three principal
barriers to ODF adoption in the enterprise market.

All major enterprises are well down the path of developing and
integrating Service Oriented Architectures where, e.g., documents are
automatically parsed, relevant portions extracted, content is
transformed from a variety of formats to a common format, and new
documents automatically assembled from the pieces extracted from other
documents, then serialized for rendering. Pixel perfect doesn't work
in that market.

I've already explained how CDRF can be implemented to maintain
parallel branches of profiles that satisfy both the pixel perfect
crowd and the business process crowd.with round-tripping ability
between the parallel profiles.

Short story here: different users have different requirements. Every
user requirement cannot feasibly be fulfilled. But there is no
technical barrier to fulfilling the major user requirements even when
they differ. It's do-able. And all in an interoperable fashion.

Best regards,

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. (Marbux)

-- 
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>


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