Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
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.
|
This is less of an issue here than in other cases. This is open source because we believe that any work we do should be protected against isolation and commercial mercenary practices. Not that I don't love the Darwinian nature of capitalism, but this market is still so young that a few bones need to be thrown to it. I hope that the nature of the code documents
A way that documents can be converted, and
ONE model of how that data can be viewed structurally. If the actual code is useful to someone great... I just want to make sure that the code logic is available... But that is just another purpose of open source, Free as in speech, and as in beer.
I do want to have a way to save a file in a format that is as similar as how the program thinks as possible... In my mind, if i use just a small and well defined set of epub, than i feel i have made a new format, it just happens to be compliant with another format. I strongly doubt I will make anything up from scratch, and it will not be a compiled or binary format.
After this now almost 90 posts I look forward to Greg getting back into the country (he is in Ireland proposing to his girlfriend of 3+ years) and seeing what he things, and where his views are mutable. At this point continuing to focus on just simple feature lists, perhaps in order of importance, would be most helpful... so that I don't forget anything obvious during the first round of design. Don't get me wrong, I love talking/arguing/ranting/etc... about somethings true/higher purpose, ethical imparitives and all that, but with as much new stuff as is comming into my head (just read the docbook spec and the epub specs [3 of them] again, to make sure I understood them) and I have the twins still :-)
oh speaking of epub and images... for any non text media, you can list a new file format to display, and dedicate it space in the object model (sort of a media box/blob), but you must specify a fall back chain that eventually hits one of the required formats. Just throwing that out there sense there was a question about it. And yes, I know that the media evolution was just an example of goals shifting.
Im going to bed
