On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 14:09 -0400, Tony Nelson wrote: > As a programmer, foolish warnings such as the above "All might not be > safe" disgust me. Same here. I particularly hate misleading ones like MSIE's "scripts are probably safe" (or word to that effect), when it's probably unsafe; and error messages which are completely ambiguous or utterly useless (they might as well just say, "forget it, start again...". Generally, I've only noticed some programs warn me that I might lose something saving in a different format if it were true. If it could save the data without loss, even if there was some sort of conversion, it just saved it. > If the code thinks that something might not work, the author is > responsible for making it do the right thing. In this case, make the > file in a temporary place (and this is the only responsible way to do > it ever) and notice if anything didn't make it through the export > process. If that happens, /then/ warn the user, tell them what got > lost, and ask what to do. Such a warning actually means something > that the user might care about. If they don't use any non-exportable > feature in a document, they won't get any warning; if they do, they > can at least decide whether to keep using the feature. I think a big problem is that for some formats you are going to unavoidably lose some features. It just won't be possible to do what you wanted in the other format. A more sensible "publish file for other users" feature, that exported in generally usable formats (PDF, HTML, RTF, open document formats, etc.), would be a good addition to software that works with proprietary formats. But I've always considered word processors to be a means to an end of getting something typed on my PC onto paper. Not a program for giving someone else a file to read. There's so many problems with just that angle, never mind hoping that they can print it (they'll need the fonts, the same size paper, a printer capable of printing out to the margins I used, etc.). -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
