[odf-discuss] ODF Validation Service! - Online

[Daniel Carrera]

On Tue, 2007-27-03 at 11:51 +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
> I think the Relax stuff does a pretty decent job - we don't really pick 
> up many of the SHOULDs, but I don't think there is anything in the spec. 
> which isn't expressed in the schema.

Great.


> In an ideal world, the validator would give you a link to the online ODF 
> spec, although for developers who don't understand RelaxNG notation 
> that's not always amazingly helpful.

In verbose mode, RelaxNG is pretty easy to read. That's what I like
about it. Kind of like ODF itself in that regard. You can just read it
without much prior training.


> > For example, we found that if one of the XML files doesn't end in a new-line
> > character, OOo can't open the file. This is not invalid XML, it's
> > actually a bug in OOo, but we added a warning for it.   
> 
> I actually think these inter-op warnings might be one of the most useful 
> parts.

Yeah...


> > For errors I can't think of anything we miss, but I'm sure we miss
> > *something*.   
> 
> There are more things we can check: right now, we don't try to resolve 
> links inside packages (e.g., does that image I've embedded actually 
> exist in the ODF file?),

Yes, and check that any style used is actually defined, etc. I figure
that those are "warnings" (is it a violation of the spec to refer to a
style that is not defined?).

> and I don't think we warn on file formats 
> either (e.g., you embedded a .TIFF file, many ODF implementations might 
> not read that).

We don't currently. This is one of those things that requires a value
judgement. The ODF spec doesn't specify any formats and it only
recommends PNG, but we wouldn't give a warning for JPEG, BMP or GIF
because every implementation surely supports it.

Hmm... maybe that's the solution. Warn about any image format that is
not PNG, JPEG, BMP or GIF.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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