[odf-discuss] plug-in and ODF 1.2 (was: Miguel on OXML)

[Peter Vandenabeele]

Gary Edwards wrote:
...
> Over time, Da Vinci will drop all XML wrapping of these dark objects
> as they move from being dark and unspecified to being fully understood
> and specified.  I say that because i think these objects have to be
> studied and understood across huge volumes of documents before they
> can be specified fully.  But that's just me.  Da Vinci developers
> believe it will happen very quickly.  Florian Reuter wrote the
> extraordinary, near mystical Da Vinci algorithms for perfecting this
> process, and many believe there is nothing beyond his reach.  We shall
> see :)

Gary,

How would you see the chances that NEW documents, created from scratch
in MS Office 2000, MS Office 2003 or MS Office 2007 + Foundation plug-in,
could be saved without requiring "dark objects" (that is, being saved in
"pure ODF" or whatever we name it) and thus having the advangtage of full
interop with other ODF 1.2 compatibel apps. If that is high, it could be really
interesting to have a policy where NEW documents are mostly saved in
"pure ODF" (no dark objects) using the plug-in.

Do you see that the use of the internal RTF interface of MS Office gives you a
better shot at full understanding of these documents, compared to a converter
that can look at the EOOXML output file ?

What do you think of my earlier proposal below ?

> So, to repeat myself, a plug-in might be useful if it adds these 2 features:
>
> * it provides a run-time flag to select "ODF" (without extensions) or
>  "ODFX" (with extensions) as output format.
>
> * the resulting "ODFX" (ODF with extensions) files have a different
> filename extension (e.g. .odtx etc.).
>
> This will allow each organisation to set it's policy for itself (only "ODF",
> only "ODFX" or a mix) and the different filename extension will reduce
> the confusion over different interop behaviour of both document types.

Thanks,

Peter