🚀 go-pugleaf

cwbrenn@ibm.net wrote:
> 
> Could someone give me the run-down on this situation?  Does the fact that Apple is
> pulling out of OpenDoc mean that everyone  else _has_ to, or simply that it's looking
> like everyone is _going_ to?
> 
> OpenDoc has always pissed me off - not because it's lousy, because it isn't.  No, what
> pissed me off is that no one really understood everything OpenDoc could _do_, and
> the people running the show didn't bother to explain it very well.  If I'd had the venture
> capital, I could have found ten programmers and release an OpenDoc 1.1 application
> that would have been the next killer app, and raked in the money.  That's how powerful
> it is.  As it is, I'm hoping the technology doesn't whither up and blow away.  If it does, I
> feel computing will be set back _another_ ten years.
> 

Part of OpenDoc's problem outside of Apple is that it was never really
intended to work in a windowing environment. It is a graphical document
layout system, not a windowing system. Attempts to use it in a
traditional window oriented system like Windows or OS/2 are never very
appealing. As I understand it, Apple's GUI widgets are graphical and all
drawn into the one background window that they are on? This makes
OpenDoc and good choise for the Apple OS, since that's the model that
OpenDoc is designed for. If you wanted to really do OpenDoc right on
OS/2 or Windows, it would have needed a set of graphically based
standard GUI widgets that could rotate and scale and skew like OpenDoc
widgets are naturally supposed to be able to do. That would be a
non-trivial amount of work and would have be to ported to all of the
platforms you wanted to run it on. Of course now, with Java hype out the
ying yang all over the industry, the chance of anyone putting serious
effort into OpenDoc is probably not high.

------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
droddey@ng.netgate.net
http://ng.netgate.net/~droddey/