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Comment prior art (Score 4, Interesting) 68

More than 10 years ago I wrote something similar for KDE. It was called Knapsack. It monitored all keys pressed on the X desktop, all text on the clipboard and the title of the active window. It used all that text to show files related to the users current activity.

Every time a user would click a suggested file, the system would get positive feedback about that suggestion in that context: it learned.

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail...

Comment Re:5 years and no hatching patterns in Calc (Score 1) 147

In ODF, hatching is allowed in pages and graphical objects, but not on table cells or paragraphs. You could ask LibreOffice to implement this and when this works well there and in one other implementation, the ODF specification could be extended with the new feature.

As a workaround, you could use images with a hatch pattern as background.

Comment eye tatoos (Score 1) 208

You might be able to get the procedure sponsored if you choose to have a particular motif. I'm assuming that it's possible to selectively etch away the melanin. So this breakthrough opens the way to eye tatoos.

Comment WebODF handles ODF natively (Score 2) 70

Why load a document only to have it mangled by converting it to the internal format of some online text editor?

When loading a document, any document, that you want to edit and then save back, there should be no conversion whatsoever. The question of how good support for ODF is, should not be 'how badly does it mangle my documents?'. It should be a given that the document is *not* mangled. The question on how good the support for ODF, or any file format, is, should be: 'what types of edits can this program make on this file format.'

For decades, we're accepting that documents editors save back a file that, on the binary level, is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original file. How weird this leniency towards document editors is, becomes apparent when looking at at how computer programmers work with documents. Computer programmers always use plain text files for everything. When the text editors they use saves their documents with tabs instead of spaces, or utf16 instead of utf8, they get quite irate and will abandon that text editor forever. Why do normal users not get angry at document editors that mangle their documents?

So instead of choosing these horrible black box online text editors, I advise you to use something like WebODF. This ODF editor, which is purely client-side javascript, can run on your private site and saves your ODF back as it found it with changes only in the places where you edited the document.

Comment Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)? (Score 3, Insightful) 125

Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

Answer: there is no schema. Validating documents seems to have gone out of fashion. Writing a parser for HTML5 is extremely difficult. Basically the broken parsing behavior of old browsers is now standardized in a crazy arcane description of how to parse HTML5 documents.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syn...

Who benefits from such crazy parsing rules? The current browsers. This raises the bar for entry.

Comment Separate hardware from software (Score 4, Interesting) 421

A law that forbids selling hardware and software together would increase innovation. Consumers would only be able to buy hardware and software separately. That way, hardware vendors are encouraged to document the hardware and software vendors will compete on quality. Installation procedures would become very easy very quickly due to market pressure.

Comment Re:Can you say, HUGE SECURITY HOLE (Score 1) 91

The WebODF developers take security very seriously. WebODF runs in a browser and web browsers are the most battle hardened sandboxes available.

WebODF has no more access to your hard drive than any unprivileged website. If you press the icon to open a file, WebODF asks the browser to let the user pick one file. That file, and only that file that the user chose, is then passed to WebODF so it can open it. This is no different from an HTML form for uploading files. The difference is that WebODF does not need to even pass the file to a server. It is a client-side library that can parse a file purely in the browser without any network access.

If you use WebODF with a CMS, you can let the CMS decide which files WebODF has access to. When WebODF loads a document, it checks for any JavaScript present and prevents it from being executed.

WebODF is set up such that you only need a few files to run it and all those files can be hosted on your own server or placed in your own application. There is no need for any reliance on any 3rd party.

Submission + - WebODF: An ODF text editor in pure client-side JavaScript (themukt.com)

oever writes: TheMukt chides Google for not supporting OpenDocument Format well and claims that the newly released WebODF 0.5.0 in combination with ownCloud is the answer to this deficiency.

A WebODF developer blog highlights all the goodies in the first WebODF release where the text editor is considered stable and made available as an easy to use component. These include extensive benchmarking, unit testing, and advanced HTML5 techniques to give the editor a native feel.

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