[odf-discuss] A story of TIFF

[Alex Hudson]

Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Monday 05 February 2007 09:30, Alex Hudson wrote:
>   
>> Are you saying that if I save a document in Word with Da Vinci, aside
>> from a small number of features, the vast majority of it is ODF, not
>> foreign data? Say, 90% or something?
>>     
>
> You make the mistake of mixing up support for features in an application with 
> being able to read and write that feature.
>   

Not really; I actually think you're making the mistake of confusing 
implementation sets.

So, I would argue that the example of the ODF Viewer isn't a problem: 
firstly, it's not writing ODF, so no-one is having to deal with it's own 
idea of ODF. Second, it implements a proper subset of ODF.

But, let's assume we're talking about writing ODF. I don't have a 
problem with people implementing a proper subset of ODF: for example, I 
don't expect Abiword to implement spreadsheet stuff.

The problem with da Vinci is that what it's writing - and what _other_ 
applications have to deal with - is not a proper subset of ODF. It's a 
subset of ODF unioned with a set of proprietary data.

If every application wrote ODF like that, interoperability would be 
limited to the proper subset of all ODF subsets: the Least Common 
Denominator. The danger of this is that if the LCD is not a large enough 
set (it could, in fact, be empty) then ODF becomes *useless* as an 
interoperable format.

Cheers,

Alex.