It might help to take a top down approach to defining the conformance
clause, and see whether we agree on the broad strokes at least. We might
not be able to avoid a vote on the details, but let's see what we agree
first.
A conformance clause can define conformance for one or more "products". A
product is the subject of conformance, the thing that conformance is
defined for. In the case of markup languages, it is typical to define the
document itself as a product, as well as one or more applications that
operate on that document.
ODF 1.0 & ODF 1.1's conformance clause was not as crisp as I'd like it to
be, but if you parse out section 1.5 carefully, you'll see that it defines
conformance for:
-- Document
-- Applications
-- Applications that read and write
You can gleam a bit more by reading the entire standard, but if you look
at just the conformance clause you get those three products.
A standard can also define one or more conformance "classes" for each
product. In the case of ODF 1.0/1.1 there is only a single conformance
class, the unnamed default conformance class.
So the question for us in ODF 1.2 is to determine what conformance
products and classes we want to define. If our intent is to confuse
adopters of ODF, we could easily define a large matrix of a 48 or more
different product/class combinations, such as "ODF Spreadsheet Consumer of
the Loose Legacy Class". But my personal belief is when the number of
conformance classes starts to exceed the number of implementations of the
standard, then we're up to no good.
So let me propose a set of possible product combinations and see if there
is generally agreement on which ones we use:
A) Document/Applications/Applications that read & write (same products as
ODF 1.1)
B) Document/Producer/Consumer (What Michael has in his latest draft)
C) Document/Producer/Consumer/Processor (adding processor, which we could
define as an application that both reads and writes and for which we could
additionally make statements about "preservation" or "round-tripping" if
there is consensus to do that)
D) Document/Spreadsheet Document/WordProcessor Document/Presentation
Document...Spreadsheet Consumer, WordProcessor Consumer...
Choice D) would be like B), but we explicitly define products for
individual document types and applications that operate on those document
types. Probably not worth it unless we can say state different
requirements for each document type. But it is possible, for example, we
can say that an ODF Spreadsheet has