[odf-discuss] Native ODF support in browsers

[Thomas Zander]

On Friday 20 October 2006 11:31, Alex Hudson wrote:
> > I also don't understand what the "little world" a plugin lives in.
>
> In plugin architectures, each plugin is a piece of software which
> conforms to a specific API. Aside from that API, you can consider the
> software a "black box", of which you know no details. This what I was
> referring to as it's own little world.

I see where you are coming from. And you seem to perceive plugins are more 
limited because of the one rigid API that they share.
My credo is always that because it is software you can do anything. The same 
is true in this case. If you want a bigger API to do what you want, then you 
add it. Its that simple. There are ways to do that backwards compatible as 
well.

Naturally in the Windows world this is not possible as you can't possibly 
alter the Word APi at the same time as you alter the IE plugin API.
But in the open source world the approach that Konqueror took is a very good 
way to do it that shows no limitations that I know of.

In the end KDE will probably throw this idea out of the window, though. User 
tests show that people expect non-html filetypes to show up in their own 
window and be closable separately. We saw quite often that users would click 
on a PDF and after reading it close konqueror (thinking it was actually kpdf 
they were closing) and then wondering where their konqueror went.

-- 
Thomas Zander
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