I wonder...

As long as build new productivity software with advanced features such as capable tomdeal with XML, Excel files, Word for windows files, HDR graphic files, nd so on, it requires lots of efforts and long time to develop, what if in the meanwhile is it more easy and feasable to just build datatypes capable to show these kind of files, just in read mode only.

What do you think about it?

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@Raffaele

I'd imagine it would still be a lot of work to write a datatype for Word or Excel files.

Last edited by Rob on 23-Aug-2016 at 09:09 AM.

If anyone is interested in developing an XML datatype then please contact me. This is a project I am interested in.

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@Raffaele

I would agree with you here. These are the sort of file types we should have dayatypes for. So that we can just open it and see it. I'd also add mp3 to that list.

Years ago we had to pay for MS DOC readers and one I checked out just converted it to plain text. I'd hope we'd get better value for money these days. Of course these days we do have office software that can load them in or older versions.

I don't think read only is such a bad idea. After all, in OSX, TextEdit has rudimentary support for DOC. I don't think we need much more than what is already proposed.

At the end of the day, for the most part, all we wanted to do was look at file like these.

@amigakit

XML doesn't exist basically. There's no xml standard which you could make any generic reader for. It's always application specific.

Maybe some library which can parse any same style markup language into an nested linked list, for example.

Last edited by Tomppeli on 23-Aug-2016 at 11:11 AM.

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@Tomppeli

Yes, thats true. But there are many datatypes based on open XML standard.

For example docx/xslx/pptx. (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx)

Last edited by Birbo on 23-Aug-2016 at 11:37 AM.

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@Hypex

Yes, and once you can read properly a doc file, then 90% of the times is a good "copy and paste" feature you need to extract text or images from it, like for example dealing with PDF files.

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@Tomppeli

It was just an example...

Basically I am interested in in it as recently Italian government let available to us citizens to adjust invoices of our tax declarations upon web pages organized as databases, and then save XML file report of the current pending tax situation that contains the forementioned database in it.

Last edited by Raffaele on 23-Aug-2016 at 01:37 PM.

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@Tomppeli

datatypes.library recognises "unknown" IFF files and attempts to pass them to iff.datatype.

XML could do with a similar sort of integration, along with an xmlparse.library. XML is basically an ASCII IFF which is unnecessarily difficult to parse.

As regards XML datatypes, we have two different SVG ones.

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@Raffaele

Before you start implementing new datatypes, you should give the underlying infrastructure a major overhaul. Apart from a minor update (24 bit graphics) in 1999, it's essentially 25 years old.

For starters, it needs to support streaming. It needs alse new classes for "Rich Text" and "Vector Graphics" (and probably "Movie file").

As for XML: There already is a shared library for handling XML, no? Not sure why you'd need a datatype for that.

@cgutjahr

Quote:

It needs alse new classes for "Rich Text" and "Vector Graphics" (and probably "Movie file").

Vector graphics is, at least, already done: http://www.openamiga.org/?function=viewproject&projectid=51 (IFF DR2D and SVG datatypes present)

Rich Text is sort of already there via the document superclass. An upgrade of the text superclass for simple formatted text display would be welcomed.

The movie class is an amalgamation of animation and sound. The animation superclass is rubbish, it supports streaming but only 8-bit frames and is in dire need of an update. Somebody was working on this (in relation to modern video formats) but AFAIK the project was abandoned.

Last edited by Chris_Y on 23-Aug-2016 at 03:52 PM.

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@Tomppeli

Er... XML is highly standardised, and having a datype for general XML documents would be great.

For instance, instead of getting a plain text XML, the datatype could present the XML document as a traversable tree, where tags be closed and opened dynamically (something like the prefs objects editor), of course along with syntax highlighting. One could perhaps also hide CDATA segments automatically.
One could also imagine an XSLT reader for even more fancy XML processing, based on the XML datatype.

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@jaokim

Quote:

@Tomppeli Er... XML is highly standardised,

You both right is so far as the xml is a well defined standard but it can be used to describe arbitrary data of many different types.

Quote:

For instance, instead of getting a plain text XML, the datatype could present the XML document as a traversable tree, where tags be closed and opened dynamically (something like the prefs objects editor), of course along with syntax highlighting. One could perhaps also hide CDATA segments automatically. One could also imagine an XSLT reader for even more fancy XML processing, based on the XML datatype.

What you describe might be a very nice application, but not as datatype, IMHO, the trouble with using datatypes to display a meta format like XML id that sub datatypes will overide them so SVG files might display as graphics XHTML as a document, only the unrecognised types get displayed as xml.datatype

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@jaokim

Quote:

Er... XML is highly standardised, and having a datype for general XML documents would be great.

No it's not, it can't be, the FORMAT of XML is simple but as there are no limits to tag definitions all you can really do it get a 2 column list, tag and content.

XML is the mother of bloat but atleast it compresses well but is still a pain in the arse to write manually as I found out last night writing a python syntax hilighter for Annotate.

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@Severin

Quote:

XML is the mother of bloat but atleast it compresses well

Xml is not bloated, if the meta characters tags etc far outwieght the data presented it's likely simply being misused, some times plain text is best.

Quote:

but is still a pain in the arse to write manually as I found out last night writing a python syntax hilighter for Annotate.

Some syntax highlighting helps, but compared with writing IFF in hex editor, writing xml in text editor is a breeze....

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Quote:

Severin wrote: No it's not, it can't be, the FORMAT of XML is simple but as there are no limits to tag definitions all you can really do it get a 2 column list, tag and content.

Semantics. The XML format is standardized.

Quote:

XML is the mother of bloat but atleast it compresses well but is still a pain in the arse to write manually as I found out last night writing a python syntax hilighter for Annotate.

Here I whole-heartily agree! It's a horrible format! It's like getting a super big present for Christmas, and when you're finished unwrapping all you got is a box of matches.

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Datatypes are great for instead of f.ex. writing support for loading "just png images", writing a support to load "any" images, with a suitable datatype installed.

Roughly the same effort, you can still read png images (as long as the user has installed a suitable datatype), and more.

So in short, it's good for "supporting many formats for the same purpose with relatively little effort".

As for XML, what would be the other "same purpose" formats, that would also be loadable by datatypes? I can't think of any (well, any that would be more or less "standard")

Therefore, I can't see much point in xml datatype. And I wonder if the old datatypes system would work well with anything other than images, sound etc.

And of course "Datatypes being rather dated" is probably one of the major reasons, why MorphOS now has Reggae, which also supports streaming.

Last edited by Jupp3 on 23-Aug-2016 at 09:22 PM.

@Jupp3

Quote:

And I wonder if the old datatypes system would work well with anything other than images, sound etc.

It supports anything you like, but more exotic formats might need a superclass written first if it doesn't fit into any of the existing categories.

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I don't get this sudden fixation with XML - what enduser needs to load XML files into something else than (a) a text editor or (b) a ASCII viewer?

XML is either a configuration file or part of some more complicated format that would have to be handled by a datatype dedicated to that particular format (SVG, docx, xlsx...).

What good would a XML datatype do?

@Chris_Y

Quote:

Vector graphics is, at least, already done: http://www.openamiga.org/?function=viewproject&projectid=51 (IFF DR2D and SVG datatypes present)

Ah, thanks - missed that. Does really dr2d handle everything SVG/EPS does? Sounds unlikely, given the former's age?

Quote:

Rich Text is sort of already there via the document superclass.

Does that support formatting?