[odf-discuss] Native ODF support in browsers (was: HTML to ODF conversion toolkit)

[Pete Harlow]

There may be other channels to get the FF plugin 'out there'.

Just off the top of my head, we might persuade - say

- TheOpenCD http://www.theopencd.org/
- Linux distros
- Google Pack

to carry it, again dependent on someone knowing the right 'way in'...

-P.

On 23/10/06, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Good summary, Lars. Thank you for aggregating the strong points.
>
> One point should probably be refined, which was my original mistake. It
> isn't just Europe that is adopting ODF although things are going much faster
> there than elsewhere on the planet. It might be good to also mention that
> ODF is being adopted worldwide and point to the Precedent page, <
> http://opendocumentfellowship.org/government/precedent>. (And that reminds
> that I've got another half-dozen or so government adoption events to add. It
> also reminds that I need to link the Precedent page from Wikipedia.)
>
> Also, it might be good to have a fall-back position in case the FF team
> resists shipping the plugin with the browser. E.g., the plug-in might be
> featured prominently on their web site and mentioned in their publicity
> efforts. That might be done before FF 3.0. And I'm also wondering if they
> might be able to do something with their automated crash reports that would
> give them feedback on how many folks are installing the plug-in.
>
> Although I lack the competence to write a use case, I have a feeling that
> there may be some big advantages to using ODF as a web format over CSS and
> HTML in terms of ODF's XML database capabilities. E.g., sorting document
> data structures by metadata.
>
> And ODF certainly has something to offer at the edge between traditional
> word processing documents and web applications where people attempt to
> emulate traditional document publishing on the web. For example, creation of
> footnotes, endnotes, and tables of contents is a mess of different methods
> now among web apps largely because CSS and HTML were never designed to solve
> such problems, so we have instead a huge mess of different and incompatible
> work-arounds mostly implemented at the application level. For example, a
> "footnote" generated by Tikiwiki is something quite different from a
> "footnote" generated by DocUtils using ReStructured Text. Using one to edit
> a document output by the other just won't work.
>
> But adoption of ODF as a web document publishing format would allow far
> more interoperability in web apps that can edit documents. I.e., web
> documents based on HTML and CSS are not really all that editable now to the
> extent that web apps attempt to emulate features of word processors not
> supported by HTML and CSS. Chances are good that such web pages are editable
> only in a particular editor and are exported from some other format as
> HTML-CSS rather than being editable as HTML-CSS. I.e., you must at least
> use the originating application to edit them or work from the originating
> file format and re-export them to HTML-CSS. Or do a lot of manual
> hand-coding, of course. OpenDocument thus provides standards in areas that
> are really needed on the web to enable interoperability among web apps.
>
> I suspect the growing number of web apps that already write to
> OpenDocument format provides further evidence that there is demand for
> viewing ODF documents on the network.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Marbux
>
>
>
> On 10/23/06, Lars D. Noodén <lars at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 20 Oct 2006, Alex Hudson wrote:
> > > Plugins are fine, but they're their own little world, it's not the
> > same
> > > as native display.
> >
> > How about plug-in support as an intermediat step to native display?
> >
> > Below is a summary of some points brought up earlier in the thread.
> > What's missing or could be said better?
> >
> > -Lars
> >
> > Which opportunities would be opened up by having ODF viewing
> > built into the default configuration of web browsers?
> >
> > There has been demand for an increased range of formatting features a
> > web
> > page can have. (X)HTML and CSS are an improvement but not good enough.
> >
> > The Fellowship is doing nearly all of the work in creating the Firefox
> > plugin. Firefox only has to ship with this plugin installed
> > by default.
> >
> > People looking for an ODF viewer will be happy to use one that also
> > happens to be a good browser.
> >
> > FF is available even on Windows
> >
> > At the rate Europe is switching to ODF, including ODF viewing could
> > boost
> > the use of the browser.  It's possible to imagine a scenario where the
> > more of the public would install FF in order to read ODF files from
> > government sites.
> >
> > Lars Nood�n
> >         Ensure access to your data in the future
> >         http://opendocumentfellowship.org/about_us/contribute
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > odf-discuss at opendocumentfellowship.org
> > http://lists.opendocumentfellowship.org/mailman/listinfo/odf-discuss
> >
> >
> >
>
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>
>
>


-- 
Pete Harlow
Catnip Corner - Photography by Pete Harlow - http://www.catnip.co.uk/
OpenDocument Fellowship - http://opendocumentfellowship.org/
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