[office] 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 22ND, 2003, 3PM GMT – 4:00PM GMT

Attendees
---------
Doug Alberg <doug.alberg@boeing.com>, Boeing
Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@sun.com>, Sun Microsystems
Gary Edwards <garyedwards@yahoo.com>
David Faure <faure@kde.org>
Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>, Arbortext
Daniel Vogelheim <daniel.vogelheim@sun.com>, Sun Microsystems


Acceptance of Minutes of the December, the 15th meeting
------------------------------------------------------
- The attending TC members unanimously accepted the minutes.


Action Items
------------
- Daniel Vogelheim: Check quality of schemas created by schema 
transformation tools.
   - in progress

TC meetings
-----------
The next con call takes place at January, the 5th. It will be chaired by 
Daniel Vogelheim.


Discussion of Packages
----------------------
The TC continued the discussion about the URI schema for packages. It 
clarified that references from files inside a package to files inside 
the same package as well as to files outside the package are a 
requirement, but that references from files outside a package to a file 
inside a package are not an requirement. The TC further clarified that 
office application might use packages without unzipping them as a whole, 
while external applications might unzip them completely before 
processing them. This means that both use cases have to be covered by 
the URL schema used inside packages and should require no or little 
adjustment of URLs only.

The TC agreed to use relative URL references as described in proposal 1 
of http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200312/msg00029.html, 
with the exception of the algorithm to resolve relative paths that is 
contained in this proposal. Instead of this, relative-paths references 
(as described in chapter 5 of RFC 2396) have to be resolved exactly as 
they would be resolved if the whole package gets unzipped into a 
directory at its current location. The base URI for resolving 
relative-path references is the one that has to be used to retrieve the 
(unzipped) file that contains the relative-path reference. All other 
kinds of URI references, namely the ones that start with a protocol 
(like http:), an authority (i.e //) or an absolute-path (i.e. /) do not 
need any special processing. This especially means that absolute-paths 
do not reference files inside the package, but within the hierarchy the 
package is contained in, for instance the file system. URI references 
inside a package may leave the package, but once they have left the 
package, they never can return into the package or another one.

The TC further agreed to keep the specification of packages itself (that 
is to use zip files, the manifest and encryption) unchanged and to use 
the content.xml, styles.xml, meta.xml and settings.xml streams as 
described in the OOo specification.

The TC further discussed that KOffice and OpenOffice.org add a stream 
that contains the package's MIME type to all packages. This stream is 
always the first one within a package and allows file magic tools to 
detect office documents. Since this stream is not described in the 
OpenOffice.org specification, Michael Brauer will create a proposal for 
it. He will further check which MIME types have to be used.

The TC further clarified that there is a package version of the Open 
Office file format as well as a plain XML version. Both shall be 
explicit mentioned in the file format specification.


Core Feature Set
----------------
The TC agreed to add an high level overview to the specification that 
states the file format features that are expected to be supported by 
typical office applications, like word processors or spreadsheets. A 
core feature set for other kind of applications will not be specified.


New Action Items
----------------
Michael Brauer: Proposal for MIME type stream
Michael Brauer: Clarify MIME types to use for the Open Office format
Michael Brauer: Check whether plain XML file format is mentioned in the 
specification.



Michael Brauer

OASIS Open Office XML format TC chair