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

[Alex Hudson]

marbux wrote:
> Next, (and this touches on areas that I think really need discussion),
> I see the need for the ODF MS Office interop subset as a potentially
> short-term solution. My assessment -- on which I frankly admit I could
> be wrong -- is that Microsoft's resistance to generating conformant
> ODF is temporary, and an even shorter term phenomenon if it loses its
> bid for Ecma 376 to be adopted as an ISO standard. Just as with its
> previous efforts to avoid producing conformant HTML, if ODF becomes
> widely adopted, Microsoft will eventually be forced to support it.

That's possible, and although I heard that MS engineers didn't think 
implementing ODF would be a big deal, I suspect would it still be a lot 
of work.

Your example of HTML is interesting. For a number of years, our primary 
import format into Office has been HTML - simply because the extensions 
they added into it were for the purpose of round-trip fidelity, and by 
targetting those specific extensions, you can get an incredible import 
(to be fair, not all the fidelity comes from the extensions: OOo outputs 
CSS in a similar manner, so you find if you export HTML from OOo and 
import into Word, stuff like Page Breaks and things still work, which is 
nice). It's actually exactly that example which concerns me so much with 
the similar model being used in the Foundation plugin.

The one possible upside of storing the RTF data is that, assuming the 
data is sufficiently accessible, you can use libraries out of the apps 
which really understand RTF (Abiword, OOo possibly) to try to decode it 
further. I suspect that without altering the plugin itself, though, that 
new ODF data wouldn't round-trip.

> E.g., by formally  declaring that the interop subset, the foreign 
> element tags, and the
> five proposed extensions for describing dark objects are only for use
> in achieving interoperability with non-conformant applications and are
> not to be used by conformant applications to store and describe their
> own dark objects or for conformant applications to achieve interop
> with other conformant apps (i.e., Microsoft couldn't just support the
> interop subset and continue to flood the ODF market with dark
> objects.).

I suspect you then get into the world of intent.

Cheers,

Alex.