Open Office XML Format TC Meeting Minutes 15-Dec-03

[Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@sun.com>]

MINUTES OF THE OASIS OPEN OFFICE XML FORMAT TC MEETING
DECEMBER, THE 15TH, 2003, 3PM GMT – 4:10PM GMT

Attendees
---------
Doug Alberg <doug.alberg@boeing.com>, Boeing
Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@sun.com>, Sun Microsystems
Simon Davis <simond@naa.gov.au>, National Archive of Australia
Gary Edwards <garyedwards@yahoo.com>
David Faure <faure@kde.org>
Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>, Arbortext
Tom Magliery <Tom.Magliery@corel.com>, Corel
Daniel Vogelheim <daniel.vogelheim@sun.com>, Sun Microsystems


Acceptance of Minutes of the December, the 8th meeting
------------------------------------------------------
- The attending TC members unanimously accepted the minutes.


Action Items
------------
- Michael Brauer: clarify whether there are open discussion items 
regarding change tracking
   - done, see below
- Daniel Vogelheim: proposal for chart footers and placement of headers, 
footers and titles
   - done, see
      http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200312/msg00020.html
- Michael Brauer/Daniel Vogelheim: Proposal for generator ids
   - done, see
      http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200312/msg00021.html
- Daniel Vogelheim: Check quality of schemas created by schema 
transformation tools.
   - in progress

TC meetings
-----------
The TC agreed that there will be con calls on December, the 22nd and 
January, the 5th, but that there will be no con call on December, the 29th.

Miscellaneous
-------------
Michael clarified that the TC did not formally agree on change tracking 
for tables so far, because there was an action item to unify change 
tracking for tables and text documents. Since this action item has been 
moved to the 2nd TC phase, the TC unanimously agreed to keep change 
tracking for tables unchanged.


Discussion of Work Package 10 Document Settings
-----------------------------------------------
The TC unanimously agreed to the proposal regarding generator ids in 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200312/msg00021.html. The TC 
further agreed to clarify in the specification that it is allowed to use 
the generator id to work around bugs in certain user agents, but that is 
not allowed to deliberately implement a different user agent behavior 
depending on a certain generator id.


Discussion of Packages
----------------------
The TC discussed packages. It has been clarified that packages have 
three aspects: the package specification itself (described in chapter 11 
of the OOo specification), the streams within a package used be the 
OASIS Open Office format (described in chapter 12 of the OOo 
specification), and the URIs used to reference streams within the package.

The TC discussed the URI schema for packages in depth. Several proposals 
have been discussed (see also 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200312/msg00021.html and 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200312/msg00024.html):

The first one is to include the paths that reference streams within a 
package into fragment identifiers. In this case, the base URI for 
relative URIs would be the location of the package itself, so that these 
URIs would always reference files in the file system and never a stream 
within the package. The advantage of this solution is that both kind of 
URIs can be discriminated easily, and that all relative URIs in the 
package use the same base URI, that is the one of the package itself.

The second proposal is to include a catalog of streams that exist in the 
package into the package's manifest and to reference the streams by an 
identifier only.

The third proposal is to treat packages like folders in the file system 
and to make no differentiation between URIs that reference package 
streams and URIs that reference files in the file system. A very strong 
advantage of this solution is that neither URIs that reference streams 
in the package nor URIs that reference files in the file system require 
any special processing if the package gets unzipped.

The TC discussed which of these proposal best matches the specification 
of the base URI in RFC 2396.

A use case that has to be taken into account are also embedded objects, 
where the root of the document is not the root of the package, but a sub 
folder.

The discussions will be continued next week.


New Action Items
----------------
none


Michael Brauer

OASIS Open Office XML format TC chair