WebODF: JavaScript Open Document Format Editor Deemed Stable 91
oever (233119) writes with news that WebODF (an Open Document Format editor written entirely using Javascript and natively rendering the XML document using CSS) 0.5.0 has been released, and the developers are declaring this release stable enough for every day use. TheMukt chides Google for not supporting the 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.
There's also touch screen support, and better support for real-time collaborative editing. A demo shows off a few of the features.
Re:Wow! (Score:1, Interesting)
WebODF uses OpenDocument Format (ODF) as the runtime document model. That means that there is 0 (zero) data conversion when loading and saving a document. It does not support OOXML, but it could load an OOXML document if it was converted to ODF. It is not clear that the same approach (style unchanged XML with CSS) could work with OOXML. Have a look with your browsers 'Inspect Element' function in the demo. The DOM is ODF XML, not HTML.
A lot of work was done on responsiveness. A mischievous edit bot [github.com] is used to do heavy editing testing and a detailed benchmark [wordpress.com] is available for every build.
As long as you don't use page breaks (Score:3, Interesting)
It's stable and ready for every day use, as long as you don't need page breaks. I have a 3 page odt containing page breaks and WebODF just throws all of the text and images at the bottom of the first page.
How is this ready for every day use without supporting something as basic as page breaks? Page breaks go back to Word 1.beforeiwasborn
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
In collaborative mode as used in ownCloud, each document edit is stored as an operation such as AddImage, AddText, MoveCursor etc. (WebODF implements Operation Transformation for editing) With this stack of operations and the original document, any intermediate state of the document can be recreated. There is currently in WebODF no method for displaying changes in a single document, but it's straightforward to show different versions of a document side-by-side in your website or application.