XML and Ada was RE: Future with Ada

["Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif,
To: Darren New et al.
So far as I can tell, Star Office unfortunately has the same deficiencies as
Microsoft Office. Firstly, since most users only "program" using
spreadsheets, software engineering should be applied to these packages. The
Column and Row labels should be unique names. This A1, B2, etc. is at the
level of a poorly designed assembler. Lotus Improv did it right by employing
unique labels. Lotus in its search for failure killed this very well
designed product.

Real compound documents can be created using XML together with XSL. The
spreadsheet engine should provide the tables for documents. The market needs
a document based system; not a group of dysfunctional, separate programs. In
case some of you remember, there was a program from Ashton-Tate called
FrameWork that did this. It is not a new idea. However, the combined
functionality of Ada and XML will greatly facilitate the development of a
commercial office suite. If the sources are available, it will be truly
extensible.

OLE permits me to incorporate Excel data, usually graphs from spreadsheets
into my FrameMaker documents. Unfortunately, the entire spreadsheet is
incorporated by OLE into the document file. Therefore, if I incorporate 3
graphs from one Excel file, I incorporate 3 copies of the entire Excel file.
I use FrameMaker because the paragraph numbering and styles work.

Since many commercial programs can import Word and Excel files, I do not
think that it will be a problem. In fact, Excel has a Save As function for
XML. Word does not. However, I believe that commercial tools exist that can
import Word.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Darren New
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 8:57 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Future with Ada


Marin David Condic wrote:
> It could be the "Killer App" that starts having Ada make its inroad into
the
> popular idiom. The portability thing alone would be a real major advantage
> considering all the flavors of Windows, Unix, etc that are out there.

Well, if it doesn't read and write MSWord files, then it's not going to
be very popular. If it does read and write MSWord files, then why would
someone prefer it over MSWord or over any of the other MSWord-compatible
suites (like StarOffice)?

You need something that everyone will want that *hasn't* already been
done but that everyone wants. Something like OpenSSL would have been
good, except it's been done already.

--
Darren New
San Diego, CA, USA (PST). Cryptokeys on demand.
   You will soon read a generic fortune cookie.