Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: christopher.crowhurst@thomson.com

After internal review of the specification we have the following comment "Microsoft Office 2003 includes support for foreign elements and attributes. Excel and Word will ignore and preserve these elements when opening and saving. This is useful because it means you can include proprietary markup in your Microsoft Office documents, and you can count on Excel and Word handling this markup properly (i.e., not choking on it or deleting it). The OpenDocument specification states only that "Conforming applications that read and write documents MAY preserve foreign elements and attributes." This means that conforming applications would not be required to preserve foreign elements. With respect to our e-Tool products, this might be a problem since we make use of custom proprietary markup in the Word and Excel templates we create for our customers."

Can the MAY become a WILL?