[odf-discuss] A story of TIFF

[Peter Vandenabeele]

On 2/3/07, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> But I note that full
> fidelity is way more important than full interop in this scenario.
>
> If ODF were a set of formats designed only for a single office suite
> and nothing else, and flawless interop with MS Office was not a market
> requirement, then I'd say, sure, keep all the foreign metadata out.

The above are really strong statements. I try to interprete it as follows:
"In this scenario, full fidelity (flawless interop with MS Office) is way more
important than full interop and for that reason, we are introducing
"foreign metadata." "

I have the impression there are now 2 radically different views on
the fundamental goal we want to achieve with the ODF 1.2 extensions.

If I understand the above statements correctly, the primary goal of
this endavour is the full-fidelity round-tripping of documents
carrying the .odx extension from and to the MS Office application. But
on the inside, these .odx documents contain "black boxes" (aka "foreign
metadata") that can only be interpreted in full-fidelity by the MS Office
application.

On the other hand, my expectation of "Open Standard" documents is
that they have a fully, openly and freely specified baseline (locally
specified extensions are allowed in a group) and this allows _all_
applications to correctly and fully implement the baseline. Some
applications may be non-pefect at that, but that is than the
application's problem, not a problem of the document. That is what
I would call full interoperability.

<personal non-official view>
If the above interpretation would be correct, than should I interprete
this as a way to formally execute a migration to "ODF", while on the
inside allowing these "ODF" documents to be contaminated with
black boxes that for certain documents continue the dependency
on one particular vendor's software for full fidelity representation?

I doubt if such documents, while carrying the .odx  extension, are really
"Open Standard" documents, in the sense of fully, openly and freely
specified.

If that is the case, I would prefer to be straight open about the problem and
just admit that interoperability between fully specified ODF and MS Office is
not perfect (on purpose, actually), and we will have to support both formats
a bit longer in those cases where we need full fidelity. And yes, we will need
to keep some copies of MS Office around to accurately handle the remaining
.doc(x) etc. documents (but that is not different from the above situation).

So, summarized, if it turns out that we have no alternative than to
keep non-specified, non-open or non-free blocks of data in documents
for
a while, then I rather prefer those documents being called .doc(x), .ppt(x),
.xls(x) than .odt, .odp and .ods. At least that keeps the .odx "namespace"
reserved to fully, openly and freely specified documents."

</personal non-official view>

Peter