[odf-discuss] Native ODF support in browsers

[Ian Lynch]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 10:37 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-23-10 at 11:27 +0200, Alfredo Beaumont wrote:
> > Well, drupal, moodle and wikis are applications, not formats.
> 
> Yes. Which proves the point that "web technology" is not a well defined
> term. I forgot to mention AJAX, which is neither an application, nor a
> format, but is definitely a "web technology" :)
> 
> > And don't get me wrong, I am not against the proposal, I just want a good 
> > reason to do it. In my case, I want to get convinced that we need such 
> > support in KHTML.
> 
> I understand you :)
> 
> Personally, I think that there's no good reason for KHTML to support ODF
> because there's another KPart that does the job. You might make a case
> for Firefox. As for the use case, web browsers would make nice ODF
> viewers. In particular, if we can get ODF to piggy-back on the
> popularity of Firefox, that would be a good aid. It's easier to convince
> a government to publish documents as ODF if you say "12% of users
> already have an ODF viewer installed".

I think that is also a marketing case for synergy between ODF and
OpenSource browsers. If a lot of people started installing eg Firefox to
routinely view ODF files from government web sites, MS would have to
build the capability into IE or risk losing a second browser battle.

The Koffice solution is a good one but at present not available on
Windows and requires someone to decide to use the whole KDE environment
rather than just switch browsers so its a bigger hurdle to get over.

Ian
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