"Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com>
wrote on 07/14/2008 07:31:22 AM:
>
> As a more general question, the standard should perhaps
> provide an expected reaction by a version x application
> to content in version x+n?
>
> Does such content fall into that defined in 1.5 (weak as it is)?
> Ignore it?
> Remove it if you want?
>
> What should a 1.2 application do with content from 2.0?
>
Perhaps we can add some language to ODF 1.2 for how
an ODF 1.2 processor should process unknown elements from ODF 1.3.+. However,
we can't, in any formal way, tell an ODF 1.0 processor what to do with
ODF 1.2 documents, since we cannot change the ODF 1.0 specification.
As a practical matter, an ODF 1.0 processor has three
choices when ODF 1.2 comes out:
1) Do nothing, meaning it will either reject ODF 1.2
documents, or use some pre-existing generic fall-back mechanism, perhaps
ignoring whatever it does not recognize.
2) The authors of the application will make a minor
update when ODF 1.2 comes out, perhaps setting an ODF12=true flag when
loading the document and then doing some conditional processing of the
document based on knowing it came from ODF 1.2.
3) The authors of the application will make a major
update, writing full native support for ODF 1.2, probably reusing much
of their ODF 1.0/1.1 code.
My impression was that most major ODF implementations
were planning on #2 or #3. Choice #1 will lead to data loss is some
scenarios. For example, ODF 1.2 has added table support to presentations,
for accessibility. If an ODF 1.0 processor comes upon a document
with a table in a slide, I cannot imagine it will be satisfactorily rendered
by any pre-existing fallback mechanism.
-Rob