[odf-discuss] Does OO.o violate OpenDocument? If yes, where?

[Daniel Carrera]

On Fri, 2006-17-11 at 22:09 +0100, M. Fioretti wrote:
> "since OO.o doesn't support all of ODF yet (1), today distributing ODF
> files made with OO.o isn't at all a feasible solution for
> "distributing documents in an advanced open standard like ODF".

Bollocks.

1) Internet Explorer doesn't support HTML perfectly. Does that stop
people from making web pages? How many web pages out there don't fully
conform to any HTML version?

Of course, we have much higher expectations of ODF tha HTML, naturally.
But the essential point still remains valid. Perfection, while
desirable, is not mandatory. Other examples:

* Microsoft Office does not fully support their own .doc format. A .doc
file made on one machine is not even guaranteed to be legible on
another.

* Microsoft Office does not fully support their own MOOX format.

2) Provided that, for some reason, the ODF files you produce must be
absolutely flawless... then, as you suggested, all you have to do is
avoid the features that are not fully supported.

> Now, if a program doesn't support all of ODF, this doesn't mean at all
> that the files produced with it _violate_ the standard, does it?

Of course not. Here's a simple example. Suppose that AbiWord acquires
perfect support for OpenDocument Text documents. AbiWord doesn't have a
spreadhseet, so it can't support the spreadsheet part of the spec. Does
that make all *word* *processor* documents made by AbiWord automatically
invalid? That's stupid.


> It only means that you can produce with it only _some_ kinds of
> *perfectly* valid ODF files, namely those which don't need the
> unsupported features.

Correct. In my AbiWord example, that would be word processor documents.

> The only way in which the statement above can be true is if OO.o
> already supports a specific feature of OFD, but in a way that actually
> and explicitly _violates_ the standard, right?

It still wouldn't be necessarily true. Just don't use the feature that
violates the standard.

The only way that the statement could be true is if OOo is broken in a
way that affects any and all documents produced by it. I would be very
surprised if this is true.

> Now, does this actually happen with OO.o and ODF 1.0? Is it true that
> you can produce .odX files with OpenOffice which violate OpenDocument?
> If yes, in which cases? Is there an official online list of all these
> cases?

I've seen OOo misuse the spec a couple of times, but I haven't seen it
violate the spec. I'll explain. I've seen OOo write perfectly valid ODF
files which are rendered, in OOo, in a way that doesn't quite match the
spec. I remember a time when OOo displayed a list with indentation, but
the XML source didn't say to indent the list. This is the sort of
violation that we're talking about. It's not about producing in invalid
documents (as far as I have seen) but having a mismatch between what's
in the XML source and what's rendered on screen.

If you would like to test OOo's output against the ODF spec, I would
encourage you to try the ODF Validator produced by the Fellowship:

http://opendocumentfellowship.org/development/projects/odftools

This validator is the work of Alex Hudson. It is part of the
Fellowship's ODF Tools project. A project that also includes a
command-line odf2html converter and a command-line, very fast reader for
ODF documents.

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
"I AM in shape. Round IS a shape."
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