OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

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Proposal to amend TC charter, re interoperability with non-conformant applications

  • 1.  Proposal to amend TC charter, re interoperability with non-conformant applications

    Posted 05-03-2007 18:37
    I am reposting my proposal here in a separate thread for purposes of
    discussion.
    
    I propose the following changes in the TC charter.
    
    Presently, the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee's charter,
    


  • 2.  Re: [office] Proposal to amend TC charter, re interoperability withnon-conformant applications

    Posted 05-03-2007 22:20

    Cool.  I've been hoping that we would finally reach the point were we agree to change the charter so we guarantee compatibility and full-fidelity conversions with our glorious 1-2-3, WordPro and Freelance file formats.

    Just kidding.

    Remember, even OOXML doesn't make this guarantee.  Using Office 2007, when you load a DOC file and save it into OOXML format, you get the warning message, "You are about to save your document to one of the new file formats.  This action will allow you to use all of the new features in Word 2007, but may cause changes in the layout of the document.  Click Ok to continue."

    So, if Microsoft, knowing the full details of their binary formats and the internals of Word, is not able to achieve "full fidelity conversions", then I wonder how this would be accomplished in a standards committee that does not have access to this binary format specification.

    Another practical problem is that there are many binary formats out there and they may not all be reconcilable.  What if, hypothetically speaking, Wordperfect does lists according to Oliver's proposal and Word does it according to Florian's, and WordPro does it a 3rd way.  Then what?

    If you really mean MS Office and only MS Office, then we have a different problem.  IBM has voted against charter requirements requiring compatibility with a single vendor's formats before, and no doubt would do so again if the need arose.

    In any case, I am pleased to see us take the list proposals through process and let both sides fully make their argument.  Sure, one side one and the other side lost.  But no one can say that they didn't have a full opportunity to make their points.  Now we need to move on.  We have a lot of work needing our attention in ODF 1.2.

    -Rob


    marbux <marbux@gmail.com> wrote on 05/03/2007 02:36:26 PM:

    > I am reposting my proposal here in a separate thread for purposes of
    > discussion.
    >
    > I propose the following changes in the TC charter.
    >
    > Presently, the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee's charter,
    > <http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/charter.php>, contains
    > the following statement of purpose:
    >
    > >>>
    >
    > Statement of Purpose
    >
    > The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format
    > specification for office applications.
    >
    > The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:
    >
    >   1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text,
    > spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
    >   2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language
    > (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
    >   3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
    >   4. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar
    > XML-based languages or tools,
    >   5. it should keep the document's content and layout information
    > separate such that they can be processed independently of each other,
    > and
    >   6. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever
    > possible and permitted.
    >
    > <<<
    >
    > I propose that we move requirement 4 to the end of the list, renumber
    > the requirements accordingly, and add a new requirement 7 so the
    > section reads:
    >
    > >>>
    >
    > Statement of Purpose
    >
    > The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format
    > specification for office applications.
    >
    > The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:
    >
    >   1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text,
    > spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
    >   2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language
    > (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
    >   3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
    >   4. it should keep the document's content and layout information
    > separate such that they can be processed independently of each other,
    >   5. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever
    > possible and permitted,
    >   6. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar
    > XML-based languages or tools, and
    >   7. it must provide all feasible functionality required to suppport
    > full fidelity conversions from and to existing office document binary
    > file formats.
    >
    > <<<
    >
    > I believe an up and down vote on this proposed amendment would be
    > highly useful to end users such as the governments that have announced
    > their intent to migrate to OpenDocument.
    >
    > I am of course open to refinement of the proposal.
    >
    > Best regards,


  • 3.  Re: [office] Proposal to amend TC charter, re interoperability with non-conformant applications

    Posted 05-04-2007 00:53