[odf-discuss] A story of TIFF

[Thomas Zander]

On Saturday 03 February 2007 16:50, Peter Vandenabeele wrote:
> 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.

Thats completely correct.

> <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.

Well, yes and no.
KWord and OOWriter both have options and features that are not (yet) in 
ODF-proper.  This is to be expected as long as the standards group is not the 
same as the developers group.
So, the solution is to allow several ways to put more data in the doc that 
others should not be bothered with.  In fact, that's one of the basis of XML.
So, in the technical respect its fully ODF compliant.

> 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.
> </personal non-official view>

I see your point, but I disagree with your sentiment.
Look at it like this;
MacOs 1-9 were based on one technology and MacOs X was based on a completely 
different technology. The ability of MacOS X to run 'old' style binaries was 
essential to getting the application developers on board. After all; if you 
tell them to drop everything and start supporting this new thing just because 
apple said so, then you are asking those companies to place the future of 
their companies in the hands of apple. And the success apple would have in 
selling MacOS X.

The same goes for this case; companies (&governments) will NOT choose a 
solution that means they will have to support both the old fileformat and the 
new. Its too big a gamble.  And this is not my opinion, this is the opinion 
of several governments.  So its a given and we have to work with that.

With those restrictions we can follow the idea that Apple also used in their 
MacOS.  You can mix both formats just fine, and you see all the old features 
in your old apps, and the new app might not show all features yet.  But there 
is a migration path and the new applications will eventually get all the 
features you care about.

This is a simplification, but it explains the reason we added those black 
boxes in the spec. And its a proven way of migration, which is even one of 
the cornerstones of XML.

That said; I'm still unsure why there is a requirement for 1.2 at all.
-- 
Thomas Zander
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