Subject: Re: Questions about our XML grammar
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Wed Jan 10 2001 - 08:18:20 CST
At 3:05 PM -0800 1/9/01, Paul Rohr wrote:
> >* Is there a reason we call it "props" rather than "style"? Yes, it
> >is our properties, but it's also similar to CSS style values.
>
>Two reasons.
>
>1. We didn't want to suggest full CSS compatibility everywhere.
That makes sense and it isn't that big a deal, but was
wondering if there was a reason.
>Good guess. As the parsing logic in fl_BlockLayout::_lookupProperties()
>indicates, we also support fixed dimensions with "At Least" or "Exactly"
>semantics. I'm not sure how thoroughly these more advanced spacing policies
>have been tested, though.
Interesting. I'm going to have to try those out and see what
they generate in the file...
>I'm not sure this additional color flexibility is really needed in a simple
>WYSIWYG word processor, but I'd have no objections to parser (and/or
>exporter) patches here which didn't break file format compatibility.
I'm not saying that it is needed either for Abi's use of the
file format (though it is for mine ;), BUT the fact that there isn't
a # before the color spec means that there is no easy way for me to
check "is this an RGB color spec or a name" as I do in my "color
parser".
This is one thing that I REALLY would like to break though.
I think that if we don't make this change (put the # in there), we
are limiting ourselves in the future - and making my life hell ;).
>I have hazy memories of design discussions which pointed out that,
>historically, there have been two different formatting models for sub/sup
>behaviors in the evolution of Word's file format(s).
I don't know what Word did/does, though in the text engines
that I've worked on before, we kept it flexible in this regard since
apparently some uses of sub/sup in publishing require the greater
flexibility.
>Obviously a clever implementation which could handle all that mess would be
>nice, especially if it doesn't hork up the dialogs for controlling this
>behavior.
I wouldn't change the dialogs at all for 1.0, though even we
chose to, it would be a simple edit field (maybe with up/down arrows)
next to the checkbox for sub & sup.
>However, IIRC, the hard work comes in *using* any such properties.
Agreed. I'm not as concerned about seeing AbiWord use the
information itself, but it KNOWS (intrinsically) what the info is and
doesn't export it - which means that I can't use it in my app w/o
making the same assumptions AW does :(.
LDR
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