On 10/15/05, Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > And the author raises a good point. If anyone truly cares about ODF > becoming > > usable for anyone other than geeks and open source people - then a > reader is > > absolutely necessary. > > There already is one, its called OpenOffice.org
You said exactly what I said you'd say. It's such a burden being right all the time. > It has to be small enough to download in less than 10 > > minutes on 24.4 dialup. It has to be available for Windows, Mac, and > Linux. > > It has to be free, (as in no money). And it has to be easy to find and > > advertised. The more languages it runs in, the better. And, the more > OSes it > > runs on, the better - (ie, Solaris, Classic Mac, Palm, Unix, DOS, OS/2, > > etc.). > > OOo is a good fit apart from download speed. Not even close. It's a freaking beast - not a reader. Not only is it to dang big to download just to read one file - but its too complicated and over powering to just read a file. How many emails to get a day crying "Open Office ATE MY MACHINE!" because it switched file associations? And that's from people who *wanted* an office suite. Imagine the moaning we'd get when people just wanted to view the weird file their geek friend sent them. > If ODF is as open and easy to understand as people claim - I don't see why > > an interested coder couldn't make one in a day or two. > > ODF specification is 800 pages. That does not mean its not open. Easy to > understand? Depends on who you are. For an XML expert it probably is > easy to understand - its certainly easy enough for developers of office > suites to understand since many of them are implementing it. "So many of them?" ROFL! What? TWO??? Two is not many. I've only heard of 2 office suites - OpenOffice/SO and KOffice. What others? For the record, AbiWord is *NOT* a suite - just a word processor. > For the record - I'm not a coder, and I don't care if ODF lives or dies, > in > > fact, I'm pretty sure it will fail > > Such an optimist ;-) Realist. -Chad Smith
