Enrique wrote: > Is it possible to define a common API to manage OpenDocument > programmatically?(not including GUI aspects), yes, of course. And with > some more rounds of standarization and agreement between software makers > it will be a reality. Not in the short term, but an idea that deserves > consideration and long-term determination to make it happen.
This API already exists, it's DOM, but in OOo at least now (for technical reasons) it is not applicable in "live" mode. That means, you can apply changes through DOM while you load the document without any problems, but if you do it after loading you need to re-import the document (or at least parts of it) from its XML representation or keep the whole DOM in memory all the time and update your document core automatically. Both is currently not implemented in OOo, but IMHO it is basically possible to implement it. The DOM API itself is standardized, but this alone is not enough to get portable macros, you also need a common XML format - but that's given in our case - thanks to OpenDocument. Admittedly DOM is way too complicated for the average user (not for a large number of HTML hackers of course), but this can be overcome by standardizing on "high level" macro functions that can be implemented with DOM. The nice thing is that this implementation has to be carried out only once in each scripting language and each application that implements DOM can use it (provided that it has a suitable component technology and language binding for the scripting language and the component technology). This way we decouple the different efforts: A group of people can think about a standardized, more procedural or "conventional object" oriented approach for macros and provide implementations for it based on DOM calls for different scripting languages. If all applications used the same component technology we would need only one implementation of this API that can be used in all scripting languages, but that is very unlikely to happen. Each application that wants to support the standardized macros must provide a suitable component technology (like UNO) and a DOM API implementation based on it that can be called from any scripting language that is able to utilize this component technology through a language binding. This is already possible with OOo. Additionally to support "live editing" of documents a DOM update mechanism must be implemented for the application and OOo currently doesn't have this. It's a huge undertaking, but IMHO it has a higher probability to get implemented than anything else I can think of with the goal of macro standardization. And it has the additional benefit that it automatically falls back to OpenDocument! Please get me right: I don't ask for doing this now or in the near future, but *if* macro standardization ever became a high priority that's the way I would like to do it. Best regards, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead Please reply to the list only, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a spam sink. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
