The idea to use XCF in an AbiWord document makes me shudder.
The AbiWord folks actually liked the idea! I don't know how many people will actually use it - but it's nice to have and it continues to improve the integration of "GNOME Office".
For image web galleries, I'd suggest they use GIMP in batch mode to convert to another format or to create the thumbnails directly. That would probably have been a way to go for ImageMagick too.
For whatever reason, most (all?) of the products in this space have chosen to use IM (or something similiar) to do the conversions rather than going to GIMP. If I were to guess, I would suspect it's because they can interact with IM directly from Java, Perl and PHP instead of having to build "batch files" and then run Gimp (higher overhead).
I don't think XCF is intended to be a file format for image distribution.
OK. If that is not the intent, it's not the intent!
It is as much a bad choice for image distribution as Photoshop files are, or Word files for exchanging text documents.
I would argue that for "non-simple" images, the Photoshop format has a lot going for it! Sure, if all you want is a "flat bitmap", it's WAY OVERKILL - but for layered CMYK images with clipping paths, it's the way to go! In fact, I once had a client with the requirement of taking CMYK images with 16million colors and either transparency or clipping into PDF/PS documents. The only image format that met the requirements was Photoshop/PSD.
It's sole purpose is to save intermediate states of your work and probably exchange it among GIMP users.
In that case, I definitely WONT implement saving as XCF!
Leonard
