Re: [office-comment] Public Comment

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

Dear Mr. Crowhurst,

The intention behind the conformance rules in section 1.5
is to specify how the OpenDocument format can be extended. Such
extensions usually would be implemented by adding a certain, well
defined set of elements and attributes to the OpenDocument schema. Such
extended schemas could be future OpenDocument specifications, or other
schemas based on the OpenDocument schema. It is assumed that there are
applications that interpret the extensions, as well as at least a subset
of the OpenDocument schema. That is, the extensions actually specify
certain new features.

What is not the intention of section 1.5 is to specify a "custom schema"
feature for office applications. A "custom schema" feature could be
described as a feature that allows to add "custom" markup within an
office application or some other editing environment, that has no
meaning for the application itself except being there.  The proposed
change seems to be a proposal related to custom schema support. Caring
about such "custom schema" support actually is on the agenda of the
OASIS OpenDocument TC for a future version of the specification.

Regarding section 1.5 itself: The Open Office TC decided to use the term
MAY rather than MUST (or will) at the mentioned location, because it
wanted to ensure that the OpenDocument specification can be used by as
many implementations as possible. This means that the format should also
be usable by applications that only support a very small subset of the
specification, as long as the information that these applications store
can be represented using the OpenDocument format. A requirement that all
foreign elements and attributes must be preserved actually would mean
that some applications may not use the format, although the format
itself would be suitable. Therefor, we leave it up to the
implementations, which elements and attributes of the specification they
support, and whether they preserve foreign element and attributes. Some
more information about this can be found in appendix D of the specification.

As said above, "custom schema" features are a topic that is on the
agenda of our TC for a future version of the specification. For this
reason, we are very interested in information regarding the use cases of
these features. Therefor, we would appreciate it if you could send us
more details regarding your specific use case of custom schemas.

Best regards

Michael Brauer

OASIS OpenDocument TC chair

comment-form@oasis-open.org wrote:
> 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?

-- 
Michael Brauer                                Phone:  +49 40 23646 500
Technical Architect Software Engineering      Fax:    +49 40 23646 550
StarOffice Development
Sun Microsystems GmbH
Sachsenfeld 4
D-20097 Hamburg, Germany                e-mail: michael.brauer@sun.com