[nylug-talk] .oO or MS Office ? Neither!

[Henning Follmann]

On Apr 4, 2007, at 8:38 AM, Penelope Baker wrote:

> stupid question...but what about google's online free doc/ 
> spreadsheet/etc stuff?  should be platform independent, and seems  
> relatively easy to use?
>

Not really any better. My problem is not the platform independence, I  
actually think neither of these office do a good job in what they are  
supposed to do: creating documents.
They all create a hodgepodge of text and formatting and loose all  
meta information (now it's a document).
And the formatting is by any standards miserable. It even gets worse  
when people collaborate on a single document.
If you ever opened a document already changed by three or more  
different word installation you will see that this is almost  
unreadable (miracle margins appear, pagination will change, lists are  
messed up). These are almost all problems with formatting, while it  
is more important to exchange information.

Here is what i'd like to see from google: a online editor that takes  
a DTD or an XML schema and gives me a nice interface to edit an  
instance of that document class (well any document class). And a  
visual editor for stylesheets for these classes for print output and  
maybe web output too.


Henning


-- 
Henning Follmann           | hfollmann at itcfollmann.com
it consultant              | www.itcfollmann.com