No, this isn’t a creationism/evolution post. But, if you care, I think that whole debate is kinda stu­pid because it’s hardly as though the two are nec­es­sar­ily exclusive.

Now that that’s out of the way (to self: must stop choos­ing obscure titles), I thought I’d announce I’ve decided that Evo­lu­tion really isn’t so bad as it’s cracked up to be (by me, in pre­vi­ous posts. Yeah, so I’m con­tra­dict­ing myself in the space of 24 hours. It doesn’t really mat­ter how long it takes me to con­tra­dict myself, because any­one capa­ble of using the search tool on this site pro­fi­ciently can jux­ta­pose the two con­tra­dict­ing pieces quite anachro­nis­ti­cally. Yeah! Eng­lish buzz­words! C’mooonnnnn, Thurs­day!). I spent part of today (more than I should have) check­ing out other clients, and I’ve decided that, unless I want to go with mutt or some­thing (I’m not going to say how tempt­ing that was lest I be pushed into a big geek hole and buried with free soft­ware), I’m actu­ally doing okay.

Which is kind of a depress­ing thought, truth be told. Not that Evo­lu­tion is acu­tally that bad, but it’s fairly far from per­fect. It’s more sta­ble now I’ve re-installed Ubuntu (gosh that sounds like Another Oper­at­ing Sys­tem), and lit­tle inter­face quirks are becom­ing slowly less sig­nif­i­cant, but I’m… rather annoyed that it ate my con­tacts list. Or, that GAIM ate my con­tacts list and Evo­lu­tion let it.

Actu­ally, I just remem­bered that I haven’t tried Opera’s mail client in sev­eral years… so I might do that. It doesn’t inte­grate par­tic­u­larly well (I’m cur­rently try­ing to fig­ure out some arcane com­mand to make the damn thing print, because it’s not read­ing from my print­cap file or some­thing, and I use it to print in pref­er­ence to Fire­fox because Firefox’s print ren­der­ing is sec­ond to none in the bad-quality stakes), but I’d rather a stand­alone app that worked really well over a vaguely-integrated app that often crashed and allowed other appli­ca­tions to steal its data, as well as mak­ing backup in open for­mats impossible.

Speak­ing of open for­mats, I’ve dis­cov­ered that OpenOffice.org 2 is stor­ing its doc­u­ments in Open­Doc­u­ment for­mat. This means that the SXW exten­sion is now ODT. I’m a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that this seems to be binary data rather than some­thing like XML… although it seems there are ele­ments of that to it, but they’re scat­tered amongst binary junk. The XML part might just be OO.o’s imple­men­ta­tion rather than a core part of the spec, I don’t really know. There appears to be some kind of XSLT going on, judg­ing from ref­er­ences to styles.xml in the test doc­u­ment I cre­ated. Another pos­si­bil­ity is that there are sev­eral pieces of data con­tained in some kind of com­pressed for­mat, but I don’t know exactly what and don’t have the skills to find out! Or, at least, don’t know where to start and hence efforts are frus­trated. It’s prob­a­ble all this infor­ma­tion is on the OpenOf­fice or Oasis web­sites, but I can’t be both­ered look­ing. I care, but not that much.

My main motive in dis­cov­er­ing what’s going on here is the poten­tial inte­gra­tion of OpenOf­fice with web frame­works, and how open for­mats (par­tic­u­larly SGML/XML based ones) sim­plify pars­ing by an order of magnitude.