Caution Flag on the Track

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

I think it might be good to step back and proceed under a caution flag here
with regard to

1. Updating of normative references that potentially introduce breaking
changes between versions of ODF 

2. Ways to insulate/confine that sort of thing and also make it clearly
visible to those who are implementing and or out to establish/confirm/verify
conformance to a particular version of ODF.  (At the least, it makes it
clear that the differences are intentional and not by accident.)

3. There may need to be some careful statements about up-level anticipation
and down-level accommodation.

[This is not the first time the concern has come up for me, so I need to dig
into my notes for something more specific.  I just happened to notice it in
Michael's observation about what may be more than editorial when citing a
later version of a specification.  It seems to me that the case Michael
describes is benign, but all tumors deserve careful biopsy [;<)

 - Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
mailto:Dennis.Hamilton@acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 
http://NuovoDoc.com http://ODMA.info/dev/ http://nfoWorks.org 


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM [mailto:Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM] 
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 01:01
To: robert_weir@us.ibm.com
Cc: office-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-comment] odf 1.1 dc:language value (unchanged as yet
for 1.2)

[ ... ]

I agree, and I suggest that we remove the full paragraph containing the 
"similar" and references to RFC3066. It is not required any longer.

Background: This paragraph first appeared in the ODF 1.0 specification 
and was not changed since when. In ODF 1.0 we referenced the first 
edition of the W3C XSD datatype specification. It defines a language 
datatype, but based on RFC1766, which is the predecessor of RFC3066. I 
assume we wanted to permit RFC3066 values, and for that reason could not 
use the XSD datatype, but had to define our own one.

In ODF 1.1 we switched to the 2nd edition of the XSD datatype 
specification. In that 2nd edition, the language datatype permits the 
values defined by RFC3066. We therefor replaced our own definition of 
the language datatype with a reference to the XSD language datatype.But 
it seems we have overseen to remove the statements that did say what our 
old language datatype was.

[ ... ]