[odf-discuss] What is actually necessary and found only in OpenXML?

[Alex Hudson]

marbux wrote:
> On 6/1/07, *Alex Hudson* <alex at stratagia.co.uk
> <mailto:alex at stratagia.co.uk>> wrote:
>
>     It's really, really, really simple. Anything marked "MAY" does NOT
>     need
>     to be implemented, under any circumstance. Any other understanding is
>     plainly wrong.
>
>
> True, but irrelevant. The issue is not implementation of a feature,
> but preservation of metadata needed by other apps. And the RFC 2119
> definition of "may" means that if it is required for interoperability,
> you have to preserve it. That's interoperability as in round-tripping.

No, RFC 2119 just does not say that, it just doesn't.

Look at the last sentence again: "[A]n implementation which does include
a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another
implementation which does not include the option".

The feature here isn't "meta-data used for interoperability", it's
"foreign data in ODF 1". The specification does not and cannot
distinguish between the *uses* of the feature.

By your logic, *any* optional feature within ODF 1 would have to be
promoted from optional to mandatory if anyone decided that they needed
to use the feature for interoperability purposes. And that's just not
the case.

I ask again: the Foundation was always aware that ODF 1.0/1.1 did not
require foreign data to be preserved, and always said that feature was
coming in ODF 1.2. You yourself said this ("A story of TIFF", Fri, 9 Feb
2007 18:27:29 -0800):

    "Conforming applications that read and write documents *may* preserve
    foreign elements and attributes."

    The Metadata SC is expected to change "may" to "must" or "shall."

    "In addition to this, conforming applications "should" preserve meta
    information and the content of styles.

    "Should" is expected to change to "must" or "shall."

    "Foreign elements may have an office:process-content attribute
    attached that has the value true or false. If the attribute's value is
    true, or if the attribute does not exist, the element's content should
    be processed by conforming applications. Otherwise conforming
    applications should not process the element's content, but may only
    preserve its content. If the element's content should be processed,
    the document itself shall be valid against the OpenDocument schema if
    the unknown element is replaced with its content only."

    This part is headed for major major rewrite to accommodate mandatory
    preservation of metadata, the interop subset, and the five extensions
    for describing dark objects.


So, how do you resolve your current position against the previous
position you held?

Alex.