[odf-discuss] strategy for ODF migration (was: A story of TIFF)

[Thomas Zander]

On Sunday 04 February 2007 17:55, Peter Vandenabeele wrote:
> > 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.


> * some organisations prefer to call all documents "ODF", even if some
>   of them contain pure "ODF" (where all contents of the file are fully,
> openly and freely specified) and others are really "ODFX" (ODF with "meta
> data", "foreign data", "extensions" that are not fully, openly and freely
> specified).

And they _are_ ODF files.  Even if they don't fit in your view of open :)

>   In this scenario, full round trip fidelity with MS Office is considered
> as the most important criterium.

In practice; thats our goal; to allow the billions of binaries that we have 
today to be preserved while still going forward to ODF.

>   So this proposal replaces:
>
>   EOOXML + ODF ==> ODFX + ODF

Exactly.
There is no need for the old .doc and the Ecma 376 (aka eooxml) fileformats 
anymore. Just ODF. With the unkown data saved so the app that requires that 
data still has access to it.
The foundation is looking for a good way to merge ODF and ODFX, as you so 
lovingly named it, in the 1.2 spec to make sure we really have just one 
format.

>   The advantage of the ODFX documents is that they guarantee full
> round-trip fidelity in MS Office.

Yes.  Or, more generically speaking;  It allows the user to not loose the data 
he created over the last 15 years.

>   The disadvantage is that full interoperability is lost for the ODFX
> documents: 

Its not 'lost' it was never there. We currently have the position that only 
MSOffice can read MSOffice 100%. No difference from the odfx idea.

> other applications (such as OO.o, KOffice), have no guarantee 
> that they have a full view on the document. The hope is that the fraction
> of the document that
>   is non-fully specified reduces over time.

Yes and no.
Naturally features that the user requires should be represented in ODF soon. 
That makes sense.
The 'no' part is that new documents will be created in new applications and in 
a new format. Free from any blobs. Many features people thought they needed, 
but actually were only for the MS monopoly can be dropped by never giving 
them priority to be implemented.

A win-win situation.
-- 
Thomas Zander
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