Re: SEUL: Boring word processors

[David Cary <d.cary@ieee.org>]

Attracting developers to something actually useful, not merely
intellectually stimulating, would be a good thing.

However, I find it difficult to believe that Free Software Developers all
think that Word Processors are boring, since Emacs was one of the first GNU
utilities; it's better than it's contemporary WordStar (or so I've heard;
I'm a "vi" man myself, and I managed to avoid WordStar before it became
obsolete) ... and there seem to be lots of free small word processors of
the text-mode era (vim, pico, jed,).

Why won't SGML answer the question ? I really don't know much about it, but
it seems kinda cool to have a extensible markup language, such that new
word processors could read old files, and old word processors could read
nearly all of a new file, and still be able to deal non-stupidly with "new"
mark-ups.

>From: Jeffrey <jeffj@micoks.net>
...
>It's not that word processors are boring. It's that the question you are
>trying to
>answer isn't always clear. What should a word processor do? Every time
>someone
>answers that by writing an app the answer to the question changes and
>then
>we have a new word processor that creates files that aren't compatible
>with the
>previous word processor. For awhile I thought SGML would answer the
>question
>but now I know I'm wrong.          -Jeff
...
>From: jfm2@club-internet.fr
...
>The GIMP is not office.  Understand than in Free Software you need to
>attract developpers.  They will come for something glamourous and with
>prestige for a programmers eyes like kernels, compilers or Imaging
>software.  Not for something as boring as a Word Processor.


--
+ David Cary "mailto:d.cary@ieee.org" "http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/"
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