Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Yes but an open source application has a more complex user base than a commercial one. While the so called "average end users" may far outnumber "developer end users" for the long term success of an open source project it has to appeal to both constituencies.
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And the better tact on that is to not limit yourself to someone else's view of documents. There have been too many go-nowhere projects that were popular only among the small group of developers congratulating themselves on not using anything original and coding themselves into corners. I know, because I've been involved in a few (yes, I actually *do* know something about open development, and if they'd only listened to me...
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
No the OP is talking about what file format to use as a master format. What that means is his program will accept input in a number of formats, convert to the master format, edit the master format, save it for later re-edit and output to a number of other formats from the master format on-demand. That means that only the master format will contain the full representation of all information about the document. That can only be considered an internal format if he intends never to let anybody else write code to process it. And that means that end users will be locked into his app.
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I read through the thread, and I think you're reading a bit much into it. His stated hopes are that there would be a nearly infinite flexibility to support different file formats. He himself *suggested* using an xml file format, though I think that may have been putting the file before the memory, so to speak. Even you suggested using an internal data structure, just as I have. (If you've been interpreting my statements to mean that I think he should create a new markup language, my apologies -- I'm talking about canonical structures *in memory*. Why thrash the disk all the time -- it wastes cycles for no real benefit given today's RAM capacities.)
Given what I described, it would be a simple matter to convert between formats using that code as a library. There is no lock to be had, any more than there is lock to be had in any converter.