[odf-discuss] ODF Viewer Update: Beta 1 released.

[Alex Hudson]

Daniel Carrera wrote:
>> Were the markup tokenized and displayed in an editor, would we have the
>> equivalent of WordPerfect Reveal Codes?
>>     
>
> I'm not too familiar with WP Reveal Codes, but yeah, I think so.

I think it's actually more complex than just allowing people to edit tags.

No ODF application I know of actually works from the text of the XML - 
they work from DOM trees (or something similar). In order to be able to 
edit that, you'd need to be doing atomic tree manipulation: the editor 
would need to figure out from what you type in how to alter the tree.

If you try to do it on the XML text, you have two issues: first is the 
tree -> text -> tree serialisation round-trip, which isn't a performance 
boon, and the second is that the user can type in stuff which doesn't 
validate as ODF or, worse, isn't well-formed XML. At that point, your 
round-trip would break down and you'd have to try to get the user to fix 
the XML somehow (which is a notoriously difficult procedure - you can't 
usually just look at an XML document and tell the user what's wrong with 
it in a sensible manner, you need to do a comparison to the last 
known-good version).

> The web page says what the license is. It's MPL/LGPL/GPL. I know that
> this is functionally equivalent to MPL/LGPL. There was a reason why Alex
> insisted on adding the GPL, but I can't remember what it was.
>   

The reason was so that people could redistribute the original tarball or 
whatever under the terms of the GPL. If you distribute LGPL stuff as 
GPL, you have to alter licensing notices and stuff. If it's already 
GPL'd, you can just say "I'm giving this to you under the terms of the GPL".

-- 
Alex Hudson
IT Director, Stratagia Ltd.
P: 0845 226 17 13     W: http://www.stratagia.co.uk/
F: 0845 226 17 14     E: alex (at) stratagia.co.uk