Conformance for documents?

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

While reading chapters 1-5 today in a waiting room, ;-), I realized 
something that we have at least partially discussed but that remains 
unresolved for the formula work.

Granting that in my view we need to consolidate the various requirements 
for "applications," we also need to define what it means for a document 
to conform to OpenFormula.

For example, under basic limits we say:

> Applications *shall* support formulas up to at least 1024 characters 
> long, as measured when in ODF interchange format not counting the 
> square brackets around cell addresses, or the “.” in a cell address 
> when the sheet name is omitted.
>
OK, so for a minimal ODF document that contains a formula, it must at 
least allow a formula of up to 1024 characters (I am not sure what "ODF 
interchange format means) "not counting the square brackets around cell 
addresses, or the “.” in a cell address when the sheet name is omitted."

That is something that could be said about a document and the 
application that produces it. (I am assuming that the producer of a 
document doesn't necessarily have the capacity to process such a 
formula, but that it can insert it in appropriate locations.)

But then skip a couple of limits and we find:

>   1.
>
>       Applications *shall* support at least 7 nesting levels of functions.
>
Err, I suspect based on 5.2 Basic Expressions that the nesting is of 
expressions? Correct?

Moreover, for a document conformance means up to seven nested 
expressions, but that doesn't mean that the document producer or 
consumer does anything with them. Yes?

I suppose another way to frame this is that the conformance requirements 
for an OpenFormula "application" are different from documents that carry 
expressions, etc., that conform to the syntax and semantics of 
OpenFormula. It should be possible to pass OpenDocument documents with 
OpenFormula conformant formulas to and through ODF 1.2 conformant 
applications that don't understand or process the formulas. All those 
applications must do is preserve the formulas that they don't process or 
understand. Yes?

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)