831–840 of 953 posts
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Look at the Google docs generated html markup some time. It’s not making nice neat ’s and ’s.
How? I thought they blocked access to the native underlying document format. Or do you mean the HTML export?
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What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Can you provide some examples of features that are better in Google Docs?
Personally, I like it better sometimes for having less features. MS Word has such a massive number of formatting features that interact in complex ways that there's plenty of ways for your document to end up formatted in a weird way and to be very difficult to figure out exactly where the switch is to make it not do something. I think one time I had a document where the entire doc was highlighted in yellow, and it to…
I use text editors so I can think about the content and if it is going to get prettied up with fonts it goes into a target system that supports markdown (confluence, git, email, etc..). If you are flummoxing around in a word processor or sending around formatted docs that aren't PDF I fully expect people to be looking at you sideways.
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> The only downside is no real-time collaboration. This isn't a small thing for many users.
IMHO HTML documents backed by a versioning system (probably fossil or pijul rather than the overly complex git) are the way forward for documents where content is much more important than presentation.
Speaking as one of the original three authors of Google Docs (Writely), but zero involvement in this project (I left Google in 2010): I'm seeing a lot of comments asking how JavaScript-on-Canvas could possibly outperform the highly optimized native code built into the browser engines. It's been a long time since I've really been involved in browser coding, but having written both Writely and, farther back, several na…
I'd like to chime in here as someone who has worked on optimizing the execution of your code :) Google docs specifically was one of the subjects of a particular performance push when I was working on Spidermnonkey within Firefox, and I got to see how it behaves under the hood pretty well. The thing that stands out to me the most was the giant sparse array (a regular js-native array) being used to store layout informa…
Does this change mean that I can look forward to being able to write hundreds or thousands of pages in a Google Doc without it getting periodically non-performant?
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It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing. Actually, now that the browser is so ubiquitous that GUIs sit on top of it (think Electron), then is time to ask the very obvious question - since everyone seems to agree that universal GUI is needed (proof: the browser) then is the browser the right universal GUI? Not being…
I feel the need to argue that the browser is not the browser engine. An app sitting in a chrome tab is significantly different than an app built on electron, they just share some rendering code paths. Electron apps have shown that you can use a browser's rendering engine to make high quality apps distributed on multiple platforms. They also have the benefit of persistence, filesystem access, hooks into native code sh…
Speaking as one of the original three authors of Google Docs (Writely), but zero involvement in this project (I left Google in 2010): I'm seeing a lot of comments asking how JavaScript-on-Canvas could possibly outperform the highly optimized native code built into the browser engines. It's been a long time since I've really been involved in browser coding, but having written both Writely and, farther back, several na…
This is just about the worst possible use-case for the DOM: you get almost none of the benefits, and still get most of the costs.
I don't see this getting fixed in the extension, since it would involve having a completely separate brittle path just for Docs. I may end up having to switch to an alternative platform for document sharing, at least some of the time.
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It looks like on Safari on macOS they also hijack right-click menu, but text selection works such that I can go to Edit>Copy and it works. What tells you to press Ctrl+Alt+Z? That's not a great experience for you to interactively edit a document if you have accessibility needs.
> What tells you to press Ctrl+Alt+Z? Invisible text inserted in the DOM with Javascript (forgive the French, it ignores browser settings and seems to use geolocation): Pour activer la compatibilité avec le lecteur d'écran, appuyez sur Ctrl+Alt+Z Pour connaître les raccourcis clavier, appuyez sur Ctrl+barre oblique
But that's interesting, especially the class="docs-offscreen-z-index". This to me suggests that they do have shadow elements underneath the canvas to support various functionality.
Thanks for the find!
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> Can I use Open Office across OSes? I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both) And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.
The only time I've ever seen real-time Google Docs collaboration has been during meetings which should have been an email. Total waste of everyone's time. Not to mention the horrible UX of people constantly moving their cursor around and moving text around. I'd suggest that pass-the-baton style collaboration would be a much better UX if you absolutely must collaborate real-time on creating a document. Which I find th…
But my experience is that realtime collaboration is useful. In particular, immediately after emailing a doc to multiple people it is not at all unusual for more than one person to be actively looking at commenting on, and maybe changing the document at the same time.