On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 6:56 PM, mathog <mathog@...1176...> wrote:
On 08-Mar-2013 10:15, John Cliff wrote:

> 10.
>
> Computers. to copy (a file) from RAM onto a disk or other storage medium.
>
> The file in memory is always a SVG, so you cant save as anything
> else...

No, you can "save" into any format that retains the meaning of the data
structures in memory.
By the strict logic you are espousing the only way to "save" a binary
memory structure would be via a binary
dump to a file.  That is rarely how it is done.  Instead the data ends
up in some other equivalent
format, including especially ones that have been converted to text
forms so that people can read them.
Remember CGM?  That had 3 formats (one in text) - all represented the
same thing, but typically none
of them corresponded to the internal representation of the diagram in
the program.

>
> like I said, I believe its wrong that we claim to open anything other
> than SVG, we dont, we import/translate them into an svg with varying
> levels of success. likewise, we can only save an svg, anything else
> is an export with a varying level of compatability.

I get the impression some of you have not spent a lot of time actually
dealing one one one, face to face,
with "typical" end users, by which I mean, people who have zero
interest in touching the code of the programs
they are using.

Right, cos non of us are the ones who admin user forums, have been responding to user emails, and talking to folk in chatrooms for multiple years... oh wait we are. I've done face to face too, admittedly less, but with a number of folks. A lot of the people I've discussed it with wouldnt even know they werent interested in the code, as they wouldnt have a bloody clue what it is. 
 
 These end users simply do not care about the fine
points many of you find so compelling, but
they do want "Save as" to let them put their data on disk in the form
that they want it to be.
The people I deal with are very high end (look where I am) and but not
once in the ~30 years
I have been here has an end user complained to me that the "Save as..."
in a program was unsafe
because it let them choose a nonconservative file format!

So people who one would hope are highly educated and computer literate can use computers? no shit sherlock. Doesnt take a caltech education to work that one out. The very fact your in an environment that is probably very much non average for inkscape users makes your observations less useful. so yeah, I'll look where you are, and then take your observations with a pinch of salt. 
 
Remember KISS?  TSM's Open, Save, Save as... is KISS.  (And some
programs dispense with "Save as..." as well, using
Save to mean both things.)  Open + Import, Save + Save as.. + Export is
not KISS.  For TSM
all an end user has to know is that they want to open or save a file.
For SUM they have to know which file
formats are conservative and which are not, and they have to know this
before they select one of those file menu
options.  So I repeat for the umpteenth time, SUM is not actually going
to benefit any of the real end users, but it
is going to inconvenience many of them.  If the goal is really to
protect end users from themselves then automatic
backups is a far better option.

KISS gos both ways, you can keep the menu simple, and make the dialog do both lossy and lossless formats. or you can make the menu slightly longer, and keep the principle simple, one does lossy, and one lossless. With for TSM until they hit save and get a warning they have no idea if its conservative or not. the other way its defined by the top level choice.