Talk:OpenDoc

OpenDocument disambig

Is OpenDoc based on the Open Document Architecture from ITU-T? Apple are told to have joined the piloting project for ODA. Nixdorf 20:09, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

No, OpenDoc is not a document format, rather an interoperability environment, like OLE on Windows. The underlying technology is based on IBM's CORBA specs. Graham 11:59, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

WAV disambig

A little confused...

The link for "WAV" as in the "WAV Word Processor" points to the .wav sound file format and nothing to do with the title of the application - right? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mproud (talk • contribs) 07:58, April 21, 2004 (UTC)

Fixed. Dysprosia 07:59, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Insider's Take needs rewrite

That part is very interesting, but has no signature and is not very "encyclopediac". It needs a rewrite for style. Stormwatch 18:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

The sumary attributes it to Daniel Barbalace, whoever he is. --Error 23:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

i like the style, it has a personal feel but it's also very informing. Minor changes should be made, but it should stay because it makes for very good reading. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.74.9.227 (talk • contribs) 03:40, January 6, 2006 (UTC)

I recommend a disambiguation page now

Very interesting info but obsolete. I came here and read it to find Opendocument data and I enjoyed the hour I wasted but an hour is an hour. I think there should be a disambig. page -- but I added a bold heading to the steering statement at the top. Thanks.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Xgenei (talk • contribs) 09:24, 29 March 2007 (UTC).

• I don't think a disambiguation page is necessary - there's already a link to OpenDocument on the first line. It's unfortunate that you skipped that line and read the whole article before realizing it, but I think the note at the top is sufficient. "OpenDoc" is not an official abbreviation of OpenDocument, to my knowledge. MFNickster 13:44, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

The icon...

...looks squished. Anyone know how to fix it? Maury 22:33, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Last system to support it?

I've spent about half an hour searching the web without success - what was the last system to support OpenDoc? Was it 8.6? --John_Abbe 10:38, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

OpenDoc was dropped in Mac OS 8.5 [1], making OS 8.1 the last version to include it. MFNickster 06:00, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. So, will it run under 8.5 and 8.6? --John_Abbe 06:18, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Star?

Someone added that OD was inspired by the Star. I don't believe the Star had real compound documents, and I'm even more skeptical that it was the inspiration for OD. Anyone have a source for this? Maury 20:43, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

The Xerox Star was a MAJOR inspiration for OpenDoc. I know, because I was the lead human interface designer for OpenDoc and I worked on Xerox Star. David C. Smith, inventor of a lot of the Xerox Star UI was also an early member of the OpenDoc HI Team. Kurt Piersol (architect) and Joshua Susser (early engineering team member) were familiar with Star, partially because they used it while they worked at another branch of Xerox. And, I think Jed Harris worked briefly at PARC, although I'm not certain of this. Many of the terms in the API and UI came from Star.

The Xerox Star compound document editor was much better than anything I've seen, except for OpenDoc. The initial version of the Document Editor only supported a limited, pre-defined kinds of content, but a version released in 1986 or 1987 had a "generic frame" mechanism that allowed arbitrary kinds of content to be embedded within a document. Each frame was always "live" and the user could edit the content in place. For more info see http://www.digibarn.com/collections/xerox-all.html

David Curbow —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.180.82.153 (talk • contribs) 04:17, July 7, 2006 (UTC)

Those videos are great! You can really see how the "document-centric" model of computing was supposed to work. There are no obvious applications being launched, just document elements being edited. Kind of makes you wonder where we'd be today if Apple had gone that route from the beginning. MFNickster 05:55, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

AJAX?

"With the advent of modern web technologies like AJAX, such documents are far more common now than they were at the time, and the integration is performed using javascript and the imaging model of standard browsers."

How is this at all relevant to OpenDoc? Even the best AJAX document editors pale in comparison to things like WordPerfect for DOS. This comment is just feeding the hype surrounding AJAX and has nothing to do with the topic. It should be removed.

Web apps and Java

"They were inherently cross-platform, as well as riding a massive Java hype fest."

The phrasing of this is poor, especially the word 'fest'. Additionally, its not true. Java didnt compete in the document editing world at all, ESPECIALLY in this time period. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.24.117.190 (talk) 03:36, 25 April 2007 (UTC).

PC Windows Version

Hello,

I know that a PC Windows version actually exists, because I had once downloaded it from the IBM site. But - this isn't mentioned anywhere. I suggest that it might be added. IBM had once kind of a sub-site called "Club OpenDoc", there the downloadable package was located. Alrik Fassbauer 18:33, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Wasn't that an OS/2 version rather than Windows? I can't remember offhand. MFNickster 20:26, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Here is a newspost from IBM which references it.

BTW, the article fails to mention that WordPerfect stopped development on OpenDoc/Windows and threw it to IBM. This was one of the more important reasons that OpenDoc never saw any major adoption. 64.171.162.77 04:36, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

WordPerfect was an orginal member of the CILabs consortium and signed up to produce the version for Windows. IBM, another member of CILabs, produced a version for OS/2 and AIX -- although I can't remember if the AIX version ever shipped. IBM named their developer effort "Club OpenDoc". --Dcurbow 18:00, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Page layouts and spreadsheets

"For instance, it seems unlikely that anyone would want to include a page layout view inside their spreadsheet, or spreadsheet inside their page layout."

Interestingly, Apple's Numbers spreadsheet application is exactly that. iWork '08 has very little to do with OpenDoc, except in concept -- each of the applications (presentation, spreadsheet, document) is able to hold and layout the same types of content; it's just the focus of the app and the container controls that differ between them. --Jellyvista 00:51, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

I removed the offending sentence. Remember ClarisWorks? One of its strengths was being able to embed any kind of view in any other view, for example a spreadsheet in a word processing doc, or vice versa. Anyone who used ClarisWorks heavily remembers how powerful that was. --User:tooki 84.253.11.96 (talk) 10:53, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

There's a speculative statement in the article under the 'problems' header stating that compound documents aren't very useful. But that statement seems flatly inaccurate when one considers web pages, which, of course, combine a myriad of formats and are often useful. 76.67.63.230 (talk) 04:51, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Microsoft's reaction on OpenDoc

Microsoft's alleged attitude against OpenDoc is illustrated in an email, made public int the Comes-Microsoft case.

From: Greg Whitten [gregw] Sent: Monday, November 22, 1993 10:51 AM To: Bob Atkinson; Bob Muglia; Jim Allchin Cc: Mike Maples; Paul Maritz; Tony Williams Subject: RE: WP, OpenDoc

We have to take the hard line. We can't give OpenDoc even an inch as easy runtime interface to OLE 2.0.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.101.91.31 (talk) 11:50, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

IronDoc

Former developer of OpenDoc (David McCusker) was working on IronDoc after OpenDoc was closed.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021015172926/http://mccusker.best.vwh.net/fe/fe.htm

Aekton (talk) 00:58, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Aekton, as I understand it (which is fairly well), IronDoc was a new version of the Bento document format, not a new OpenDoc per se. Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:13, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Collaborating Companies

I just happened to read this article today and was surprised that IBM is barely mentioned and that Novell is not mentioned at all. Yes, Apple was the inventor and leading designer of OpenDoc, but Novell and IBM also were key implementers. The IBM team in Boca Raton Florida focused on the OS/2 implementation. Apple worked on the Mac version. I believe Novell worked on Netware. I believe the Windows implementation started with WordPerfect, which was acquired by Novell. IBM might have as well in support of OS/2's Windows layer. I recall some Unix activity but I forget who was involved with that. Jasonnet (talk) 14:20, 22 October 2018 (UTC) Edit: Jasonnet (talk) 19:19, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

BTW... I agree with the comment above the AJAX has no relationship with OpenDoc. The concepts are totally different. Jasonnet (talk) 14:20, 22 October 2018 (UTC)