Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
>
> Its wonderful to hear you've made such great progress.
>
> First of all, I'm against tying any of the APIs to XML
> parsers/libraries. (There are many painful reasons for this that
> resemble our logging experience -
> there is what is called XML-hell which is in essence requiring one
> version of an
> XML library when you are using another....very painful) So If we do an
> XML format this early (which I don't think is a good idea to be honest),
> IMHO it should be part of MORPHOS. The only problem is working on
> Morphos is an absolute pain due to the fact its in Jakarta Commons which
> has more traffic in a day then this list gets in 6 months!
HSSF has gone this way, it's a perfect way for separation of concerns.
IMNSHO it should be done in Morphos.
> As for docbook, I'm not sure it is a good idea. I think FO is probably
> better suited for this kind of data. Docbook AFAIK doesn't preserve the
> styling very closely. With FO you could achieve a near 1-1 without any
> mismatch or
> *loss*. I could be wrong on this, I highly suggest you solicit the
> advice of
> Nicola Ken who knows more about such things. And hardly anyone knows
> docbook either for that matter.
As I said in an earlier mail, both don't quite cut it, because docbook
is too big and semantically rich, while FO is only about style.
Make your DTD and it will be easier for all.
> Lastly, I'm not sure I'd vote to move HDF out of the scratchpad before
> it has write capabillity. I view that as the test of maturity. The XML
> stuff is cool
> and while I think using XML for Excel makes a lot of sense, using it for
> Word makes
> even more sense, but the test of maturity in my mind is when you can
> read it in
> and write it back out all in one swoop. Until then I think the
> scratchpad is still the best place, but I'm interested in hearing what
> others think on that matter.
Read and write loopback is an excellent way to do unit tests.
Being in the scratchpad is not a bad thing, just a phase in development.
Imagine all sorts of people asking you on the mailing list how to write
a word document with HDF... you get the picture ;-)
--
Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- verba volant, scripta manent -
(discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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