Calligra on Tizen and beyond

[Jos van den Oever]

On Friday, September 30, 2011 18:48:59 PM Sebastian Sauer wrote:
> On 09/30/2011 06:17 PM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> >> Anything you do in such development is constrained by WAC unless you
> >> agree to break compatibility and inject binary lib - then you'd have
> >> to deploy it to other systems too (but the why to skip native Qt
> >> programs?)
> > 
> > I don't agree. I think it's perfectly possible to write a full-featured
> > office suite in html + javascript. Google has already done that.
> 
> google docs is not even close to be a full-featured office suite. It's
> an extended text-editor
> on top of a relational db. The gdata-API is insufficient for anything
> more complex. But then
> that is also an advantage. They don't try to be feature-complete with
> MSOffice/OpenOffice/Calligra
> but only offer an online (and since some time even offline) richtext
> editor/calculator/presenter.
> 
> But yes, I think that it would be possible too :-)

There are things that are simply impossible or very hard even in HTML5. For 
exmple consider positioning of draw:frame in a brower. The anchor can be 
relative to paragraph, to character or to page. This distinction is not so 
easy to do in CSS. I give this example since I've studied that recently. 
Another topic is wrapping. CSS has muchs less fancy wrapping. And third quick 
example is tabs. HTML does not have tabs. You can simulate them with tables to 
a point. These are few caveats that show that doing all the layout that ODF 
allows is atm beyond an HTML page. WebODF makes a good effort, but it is not 
perfect.

There are three possible strategies:
 1) go with HTML5 and use do what is possible,
    downside: not perfect
 2) use Qt and do everything right,
    downside: not just HTML
 3) use <canvas/> and do everything right.
    downside: ton of work and redoing all the text layout code

WebODF uses option 1). Calligra does option 2). Option 3) i have not seen yet. 
WebODF will go and use that in some places but not to solve e.g. the tabs 
problem since text on a <canvas/> is not selectable.

What the best solution is, I cannot tell. I think that HTML5 layout will 
become more advanced and that webodf will benefit from that.

Cheers,
Jos

-- 
Jos van den Oever, software architect
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