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.).