Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
@kfarmer
I'm afraid you don't really get open source development. Open source development is all about interoperability and re-use. The end users of open source development are other open source developers, not users. That does not mean that making applications easy to use for conventional end users is not important, but it does mean that it is *more* important to make an application easy to use for other developers. That is how open source thrives.
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(I spend 26 years programming, 10 of them professionally, all but 2 of those in startups, and I don't "get" sharing source code with others... I'm amazed!)
But let's be serious. Applications exist to benefit the end-user. Without a user, an application has little reason to exist beyond academic experimentation (itself a fine past-time, but hardly worth advertising as a product). What I described was a widely used -- consider multi-format editors in general -- means to maximize the potential benefit to users, while buffering against the types of changes seen in the real world.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
An important part of the process is using standards wherever possible. Mutating formats arbitrarily to support today's hot new feature is the way to make your application the Internet Explorer of whatever field it is in.
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Standards make sense for externals, and on that we can agree. But internals can (should) be using whatever gives them the advantage. What I was describing was the internals -- what the OP spoke of as what the application would "think in". You're focussing (apprently) on externals, and nothing I've suggested prevents the architecture so described from emitting pure, clean epub if it wanted. But pure, clean epub is just as much a lock-in as any other model developed by any third party.
And I'll state it: standards are meant to be abandoned when they become a hinderence. That's why there *is* a ratification process to get better standards, and every so-called standard started out as a non-standard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Incidentally, epub as a markup specification can support any image format. Rendering the images is of course dependent on support for that format in reader software.
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Lacking the epub spec I'll accept that. So, does it (like pretty much every other container format) just deal with it as a blob? In which case you still face the problem of deserializing, editting, and serializing new formats. My suggestion still stands.
Gotta run to a late lunch and a long meeting. TTYL