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On 14/05/11 11:29, Grant Sewell wrote:
No that’s NOT what I wanted - I want the DATA xml (or JSON or whatever) formatted - ODF is about presentation. When I get an invoice I'd like the DATA in it (dates, address, invoice number, company identification etc) formatted so that my accountancy package can read it straight in. ODF will give me something that may look nice on a piece of A4 but I DO NOT WANT TO EVER READ IT so I really don’t give a toss what it looks like. That goes for >90% of documents I receive. Practically none of them are any use computer wise. But give me that formatted data I can make a human readable document in a blink of an eye - but the other way round- getting data out of documents is a very laborious process. 20 years ago a lot of companies used to use EDI - I worked for one that took over 2000 orders over a 2400 baud line in about 40 minutes -straight into its erp system. Once they started using documents they had to employ over 100 people to carry out the same task. Thats 100 copies of office software doing what an 8086 pc could manage with its eyes shut.On Sat, 14 May 2011 07:33:57 +0100 tom wrote:On 13/05/11 18:26, Grant Sewell wrote:<snip> *Some* documents are in proprietary formats. Not all. Grant.For proprietary read 'human and not computer'. Its very very easy to take computer interpretable data and present it for humans to read. Its not so easy the other way round. To my PC an ODF document is just garbage compared to the same data in an XML file which can be made human readable with a style sheet. I'd guess than most homes and offices have encrypted (and lost)>90% of their data in documents. Tom te tom te tomFunny, I've just taken a random (fairly small) ODF spreadsheet document on my computer, renamed it unzipped it (since it seems to be a fairly standard zip compressed file), and this is what I found: content.xml: XML document text meta.xml: XML document text mimetype: ASCII text, with no line terminators settings.xml: XML document text styles.xml: XML document text META-INF/manifest.xml: XML document text Thumbnails/thumbnail.png: PNG image, 225 x 256, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced Now, as far as I can tell almost all the above components of that ODF document are XML, which is exactly what you wanted. I'm not entirely sure I understand how you can say "To my PC and ODF document is just garbage compared to the same data in an XML file" when an ODF document comprises almost exclusively XML files. Sure there is a PNG file but I'm not sure normal XML is the best way of storing 225x256 pixels of 8bpp image data. I have no doubt it *could* be done, but is it necessarily the best way of doing so? Grant.
Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq