Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Phillip Lord]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > IMO the future of GUI apps and in our case editors, lies in browser
>   > based frameworks programmable by some lisp dialect. For the moment it
>   > would be a stack based on electron, clojurescript, codemirror, etc.
>
> I have a feeling we are talking about totally unrelated questions.
> I'm talking about extending Emacs to edit more kinds of _documents_.
> Documents with more and different layout features, but still _documents_.
>
> A document is a self-contained file of declarative data that you can
> display and edit on your computer, without any sort of network
> connection.  And if you send it to me, I can display it too
> and it looks the same for me as for you.


No, it really isn't. A document is a user-centric feature -- it's a
piece of work that stores information in a way that it useful to the
user. The self-contained file notion is a developer issue.  And,
document editing has moved partially (although not wholly) away from the
"your computer". People edit documents in editors built entirely on the
web. To show it to you, I just send the link.

Following your definition, MS Word becomes a document editor and MS Word
Online does not.

Phil