Hi Lars, *
don't know why you try to badmouth me - I think you know my dedication
to OOo as well as my contributions well enough...
Lars Nooden schrieb:
On 04/14/2010 12:15 AM, Bernhard Dippold wrote:
I don't want to discuss the design of the icons here - it's about their
basics:
Bernhard, please read up on the interoperability goals of ODF, that
might help you catch up.
Lars, please read my mail again (or the one's I posted during the last
months on disc...@ux or d...@marketing):
I wrote that I fully support interoperability - and that I want it to be
visualized on the user's desktop.
But there are different goal to reach with the document icons.
One of them is supporting ODF as general standard for all office data
formats (at least most of them).
Another is providing the user with information about the application she
or he is using as standard to open these files. This is not important if
you just want to open a file and view/hear it's content. But if you want
to modify it, the application is crucial, because every application
provides different features and possibilities to do so.
The third is consistency between preview and symbol. At least on Windows
most file previews don't only show the content of the file, but the
application symbol at the lower right corner. This additional
information helps not only to know about the application, but also to
distinguish between different files (on my Ubuntu, I can't differ
between a PDF and an ODG file from the preview, I have to look at the
file extension).
The last (and IMHO not least) point is OpenOffice.org marketing and
branding. Our project is OpenOffice.org. We want this application to
become the most used office suite in the world. And we want to attract
people to join our community.
As long as we can provide icons that consider all these goals, I can't
understand why one of them should be the only relevant.
We are a community supporting OpenOffice.org in different areas.
If any modification to the product or to our perception in public is
relevant to several areas, this shouldn't be done without involving the
relevant OpenOffice.org projects in the decision about this
modification. With their expertise these modifications will be able to
be improved with regards to their effects on the entire OpenOffice.org
community and user base.
The document icons are one of the most visible areas in our users'
perception. They should not be changed by any contributor (even if it is
the largest code contributor of OOo) without addressing concerns from
the relevant OOo projects (UX, marketing, branding/art).
What I want is, that the community decides about such changes - and if
there seems to be no way to come to an agreement, it's part of the
Community Council's tasks to decide and find a solution that covers the
interests of the entire community - especially, if Sun/Oracle declares,
that the never officially supported decision is not allowed to be
discussed or reverted in future.
Best regards
Bernhard
Even if I understand most of your posting, there are some points I want
to add:
In general, a fundamental goal of a universal document format is that
it is independent of specific application. JPEG, MPEG, FLAC, PDF,
Vorbis and other standard formats do not have application-specific
icons. ODF does not have them and should not acquire them either.
There has not been any application independent ODF icons in the past -
they have been created by Sun for StarOffice 9.2 and OpenOffice.org, but
as far as I know no other application except StarOffice uses these icons
up to now.
On my Windows Vista the document icons for JPEG and PNG show my standard
application's symbol (IrfanView), SVG is related to Inkscape. PDF shows
the swirl of Adobe Reader, MPEG and OGG the symbol for VLC. Even HTML is
related to SeaMonkey. I can upload a screenshot if you want. Just to
clarify: That is not the way I want to go - I want general ODF icons
with a small application symbol.
During the early days of ODF, M$ boosters spent a lot of effort
trying to equate ODF with OOo. Now is not the time to go backwards.
We don't go backwards, as the present icons in OOo3.2.0 are still
application specific. Oracle wants to change them in order to remove Sun
related branding (the S-curve), but they combine it with a general
change in the icons' focusing. If they had done it in coordination with
the relevant OOo projects, this would have never become a topic for the CC.
Having OOo specific icons is false, because ODF is for all suites. It
also is bad marketing for OOo because it implies that somehow OOo
might not be using real ODF and instead using a broken version, like
M$ Office does.
Please have a look at the icons I proposed as compromise [1]: Their main
area is ODF specific, the application symbol is just at the lower right
corner (like in a preview).
So my proposal was about general ODF icons that allow the user to know
the specific application she/he uses to open and modify the documents -
and about including the community in such relevant changes to OOo's
perception in public.
But I know that I'm not alone...
[...] branches of M$ like Novell support the same divisiveness of the
data formats. ODF is for all productivity suites.
If you have problems with Novell, please keep them off a constructive,
goal-directed discussion.
I talked about marketing and UX people inside our community like John
McCreesh, Christoph Noack and many others that tried to have their
concerns heard after the first attempt to implement these icons (see [2]
and [3]).
Changing the presentation of ODF files to be associated with specific
application goes against the principle of universal interoperability
and, visually, endorses the Microsoft idea that the applications are
not compatible. The era of closed systems is over.
There is a difference between interoperability and independency - I want
to show that OOo is inter-operable with all the other ODF supporting
applications. Therefore all the document icons should look similar.
But as every application provides different features to create and
modify ODF documents, a small symbol showing the standard application
helps the user without going back to closed systems or any resemblance
of incompatibility.
Koffice, OOo, SO, GoogleDocs, Lotus Notes, NeoOffice, and others are
all working for seamless exchange of documents.
Which of these use the ODF icons without any application specific
symbol? What I read on the OASIS ODF list shows, that IBM Symphony wants
to support ODF by marketing means, but not on the icons [4].
If we could agree on general ODF icons containing a small symbol for the
application, this would serve better than an icon set that is not used
by other applications...
There are imperfections, but with the exception of MS Office, these
are accidental and being fixed as they are found.
And if MS Office found a way to create files not being rendered in other
ODF applications, but fulfilling the preconditions of being valid ODF
documents, this will do more damage to ODF adoption than any symbol
added to an icon.
Years ago, OOo and SO used to have their own format, and thus a set of
icons corresponding to that mime type. OOo was the first suite of
many to move to ODF as the default format
But still uses his own document icons. We should change this - no doubt.
But the goals of the new icons and the way these goals should be
achieved are too important to leave them to one contributor and ignore
relevant groups of our community.
That's the reason to raise this topic to the Community Council: Our
representatives will have to decide, if this change in the goals of our
document icons should be as radical as proposed by Sun/Oracle or not.
[...]
[1]:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/File:ODF_textdocument_different_sizes_S.png
and the corresponding posting
http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgNo=4879
[2]: three (long) threads on disc...@ux:
http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?list=discuss&by=thread&from=2283560
,
http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?listName=discuss&by=thread&from=2286857
and
http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?listName=discuss&by=thread&from=2299760
[3]: my summary of the discussion on d...@marketing:
http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgNo=4452
[3]: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/odf-adoption/200912/msg00004.html
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