Greetings!
When discussing the problem of converting lists to OOXML lists it might
be helpful to use the examples in the OOXML specification from Ecma.
Those can be found in the Primer (part 3) beginning at 2.10 Numbering.
There isn't a list structure in the traditional markup sense but styles
that are applied to numbered paragraphs.
Note that numbering definitions are stored in the Numbering part of the
package and associated with paragraphs.
Which seems to me would make the application of XPath statements to
"lists" in an OOXML document instance more difficult.
Contrast the ISO ODF standard that has a more traditional list
structure. 4.3 Lists
I haven't worked through the numbering sections in any detail but I did
not see any thing that jumped out at me as a problem for conversions in
either direction.
Even though conversion is an application issue to no small degree, it
occurs to me that metada could be used to store information that an
application might need to use in terms of going back to another format.
True enough, that doesn't put the data inline but then I rather doubt
anyone is going to round trip only part of a document.
Hope everyone is having a great day!
Patrick
PS: The full story is in part 4, Language Reference, 2.9 Numbering (763-816)
--
Patrick Durusau
Patrick@Durusau.net
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!