Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] My perspective. display perferct?

["David Gerard" <dgerard@gmail.com>]

2008/6/30  <robert_weir@us.ibm.com>:

> If users have the expectation of exact preservation of line breaks, etc., it
> is from long participation in a software monoculture.


As I said, saying "they're wrong to want this" doesn't stop them wanting this.


>  Although the format
> may not encode the details of rendering, in practice the users are
> accustomed to sharing their documents with others using the exact same
> application, using the exact operating system, with the exact same installed
> fonts.  When you have identical software stacks, then achieving
> interoperability is trivial.  In fact, if everyone ran the same version of
> Ubuntu, with the same version of OpenOffice, then I guarantee you that every
> ODF document would render identically for all users as well.
> However, we don't have the luxury of mandating what operating systems or
> applications the world will use.  So we're limited to that part of the
> rendering stack that we can control.


People want this and will do what they have to to get this. If that
means mandating one application, they'll do that, as they do now with
MS Word.

So a failure of the interoperability TC to address this will drive
people to think in terms of applications rather than file formats ...
again. Which would be a failure of addressing interoperability.

You can keep trying to define away the problem, but by doing so you
will merely perpetuate it and sabotage the application independence of
ODF. People want layout fidelity; some start does need to be made on
addressing this need.


- d.