[odf-discuss] Alex Brown on OOo ODF validity

[Ian Lynch]

On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 23:13 -0400, robert_weir at us.ibm.com wrote:
> 
> Paul, for sake of argument, let's say you were right on the legal
> analysis.  Just hypothetically. 
> 
> The testing of ODF, even if we take Alex's rather flawed validation
> test, showed only three deviations types from ODF 1.0 when dealing
> with a 5,000 page volume of the OOXML text.  One was repeated
> thousands of times, a soft-page-break on every page, a feature that
> only ODF 1.1 has.  That would be trivial to fix -- just comment that
> line out of the OO code.  Next was an invalid URL in a hyperlink.
>  Easy to fix -- just add code to OO to validate URL syntax when adding
> a hyperlink, to prevent bad user input.  The third problem was an
> unknown use of "style:for", something not defined in ODF 1.0 or ODF
> 1.1 or even ODF 1.2.  Again, that could just be removed. 
> 
> So, if you were right on the legal analysis, and such a threat did
> come, does anyone serious think that the above problems would be a
> show stopper?  

Exactly not. So if we have one standard and everyone puts their weight
behind it we can solve any of these minor problems and get to better and
more consistent interoperability sooner and at less expense.

> These seem like things that one could fix in an afternoon.  Sure there
> may be other, similar types of problems,  but from a technical
> perspective, making a version of OO that wrote out conformant ODF 1.0
> should not be difficult, if there was a demand for such a thing. 

And what we are about is improvement rather than perfection. Perfection
can come in time and will come quicker built on the existing ISO
standard. Many apps have good .doc filters so there was a degree of
interoperability with MS Office already. odf might not be perfect but it
is an improvement on the .doc situation. OOXML is a step backwards when
we should be going forwards. As much of this is about market confidence
as it is about the technicalities and legal issues so it is wrong to
over-focus on particular aspects simply because individuals have a
particular expertise or perspective. A bit of helicoptering above the
whole picture is needed in order to avoid throwing out the baby with the
bath water.

Ian
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