OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

OK, can someone remind me how to mute and unmute the phone?
I was on the call today, but it seems that after the echo problems I muted the phone
(I found *6 by googling), but I wasn't able to unmute again afterwards (the page said
to do *6 again, didn't work)... What's the magic combination?

I just wanted to say that IMHO we can never achieve 100% compatibility with a format
like msword. We should of course add the necessary features where they make sense,
but I don't think it makes sense to add all the corner cases that might differ by a few
millimeters in the layout of lists, for instance. So if a sensible proposal is 99% compatible
and the full-100%-compatible means basically copying the MS XML into ODF without any
hopes of feasibility of implementation, or any resulting spec that anyone would understand... 
then I take the sensible proposal.

But I don't know if this applies to the current proposals about lists, the question was only
about the general approach :)

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).

David,

David Faure wrote:

>OK, can someone remind me how to mute and unmute the phone?
>I was on the call today, but it seems that after the echo problems I muted the phone
>(I found *6 by googling), but I wasn't able to unmute again afterwards (the page said
>to do *6 again, didn't work)... What's the magic combination?
>
>  
>
I tried several things but I think *5 was the one that worked.

Can anyone confirm?

>I just wanted to say that IMHO we can never achieve 100% compatibility with a format
>like msword. We should of course add the necessary features where they make sense,
>but I don't think it makes sense to add all the corner cases that might differ by a few
>millimeters in the layout of lists, for instance. So if a sensible proposal is 99% compatible
>and the full-100%-compatible means basically copying the MS XML into ODF without any
>hopes of feasibility of implementation, or any resulting spec that anyone would understand... 
>then I take the sensible proposal.
>
>  
>
Really depends on what you mean by 100% compatibility. I have heard the 
phrase "100% fidelity," which I think is pretty much meaningless. What 
if ODF gave a different display but round tripped any changes to the 
document to MS Word? Is that 100% compatibility or 100% fidelity?

Seems to me that ODF should be able to preserve information for 
exporting back to converted formats but I am not sure that is either 
100% compatibility or 100% fidelity. That is simply having an adequately 
defined import/export mechanism. Some targets may be harder than others.

If the requirement is to display some formatting that is never defined, 
then I take it the task is nearly impossible and probably not worth the 
effort.

Ultimately I agree that discussing compatibility/fidelity in a vacuum 
isn't really productive. With specific cases we can evaluate what 
*capabilities* that ODF should offer. How those are used by a particular 
application is an entirely different issue. ODF may provide the ability 
to duplicate the display of some other format and I may simply choose to 
not do so. That doesn't mean that there is any problem with ODF but with 
my application, should duplication of display be a requirement.

I think we need to keep the separation between what ODF enables and what 
applications choose to do very clear.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick



>But I don't know if this applies to the current proposals about lists, the question was only
>about the general approach :)
>
>  
>

-- 
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! 

All,

mute is *6,
Unmute is *7

Best regards

Michael

On Monday 12 February 2007 17:27, Patrick Durusau wrote:
> Really depends on what you mean by 100% compatibility. I have heard the
> phrase "100% fidelity," which I think is pretty much meaningless. What
> if ODF gave a different display but round tripped any changes to the
> document to MS Word? Is that 100% compatibility or 100% fidelity?

That's what most would call 100% fidelity.
So probably not what David was referring to.

David additionally said;
> I just wanted to say that IMHO we can never achieve 100% compatibility with
> a format like msword. We should of course add the necessary features where
> they make sense, but I don't think it makes sense to add all the corner
> cases that might differ by a few millimeters in the layout of lists, for
> instance.

I agree.
msword (or Ecma 376 as its now officially called) is a format that has been 
build up over 10 years. With all the programming mistakes and the restarts 
that you can typically see while building a product that basically invented a 
lot of this stuff from scratch.
The recent proposal I have seen on this list for list-formats are a really 
good indication for where wanting to reuse that work basically makes me feel 
that we are throwing out the odf-baby with the bathwater.

Really, are there people that refuse to switch to ODF because their list item 
is positioned 2 mm to the left of where Word placed it? And if so, do we 
care? ;)
-- 
Thomas Zander

Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org> wrote on 02/12/2007
01:37:05 PM:


> Really, are there people that refuse to switch to ODF because their
list item

> is positioned 2 mm to the left of where Word placed it? And if so,
do we

> care? ;)

I think it's important to see this as a two-sided
question -- do we have a real technical requirement, and do we have a real
political vulnerability?

I find that most people understand the notion that
100% Office compatibility is an elusive dream, but they feel better if
they think that the ODF committee tried to get as close as possible to
that goal.  So I'm reluctant to ever see us turn down something like
this because it "isn't important."  By doing so, we would
be implicitly downgrading the importance of Office compatibility, which
I think is the wrong message to send.

So, I don't know if we have to support those last
2 mm any time soon, but I'm not sure that means we want to formally decide
that we never will.  I could easily see us deciding that it just isn't
a high priority at this time.  But then I could see us changing our
minds if we found out, for example, that EU documents are required by Brussels
to position their lists 2 mm to the left.  

If we table the question now, we're not wasting time
on a dubious need, but we're also not officially ruling out eventual six-sigma
fidelity for MS Office documents.  -- Nathaniel