On Jun 11, 2008, at 10:01 PM, Diego Jacobi wrote:
I am not sure if an standard of it could be made in the strict sense
of the word.
Diagrams are used for too many kind of representations in many
different ways. And example could be an electronic circuit analysis
in blocks vs a genealogical tree. (The last having a std. format)
Both are too much different so it will depend on the application.
I don't think so. Yes, formats specifically made for either one could
be more concise and have more assumptions built in, but both would be
doable in a generic diagram. It's rarely a question of "can't" or
"can", but of how cumbersome it is. I have done poster layout in both
Dia and Excel, for lack of a really good layout program. Neither are
made for it, but both can be used. That said, there's an immense
danger in trying to do a format that can do everything. Picking a few
core use cases (say, informal UML, flow charts, illustration of memory
layout) would make it easier to see what's essential.
Just using a zipped XML with a png screnshoot like in ODF will be
good enough (i don't know how is the actual format). And of course,
the format should be on top of SVG, then any exporting or printing
functionality would be done by a common library for svg.
But what dia really needs is to leave the old multiwindows (gimp
like) interface which makes it really ugly and nonstandard and make
the main widget embeddable for other tools like Abiword, OOo, IDEs,
Visual programming languages, electronic circuits, etc.
A single-window interface is part of the next release. As for making
it embeddable, is there any up-to-date way to do that in Gnome?
When most programs adopts dia as the main widget for diagrams then
its native format will be the standard.
Which would not be a good thing, since a lot of things in Dias native
format are really "Here is an X as defined by Dia's C code". That's
not even close to being portable.
-Lars
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