Proposal to amend TC charter, re interoperability with non-conformant applications

[marbux <marbux@gmail.com>]

I am reposting my proposal here in a separate thread for purposes of
discussion.

I propose the following changes in the TC charter.

Presently, the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee's charter,
<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/charter.php>, contains
the following statement of purpose:

>>>

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format
specification for office applications.

The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:

  1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text,
spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
  2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language
(XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
  3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
  4. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar
XML-based languages or tools,
  5. it should keep the document's content and layout information
separate such that they can be processed independently of each other,
and
  6. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever
possible and permitted.

<<<

I propose that we move requirement 4 to the end of the list, renumber
the requirements accordingly, and add a new requirement 7 so the
section reads:

>>>

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format
specification for office applications.

The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:

  1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text,
spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
  2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language
(XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
  3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
  4. it should keep the document's content and layout information
separate such that they can be processed independently of each other,
  5. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever
possible and permitted,
  6. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar
XML-based languages or tools, and
  7. it must provide all feasible functionality required to suppport
full fidelity conversions from and to existing office document binary
file formats.

<<<

I believe an up and down vote on this proposed amendment would be
highly useful to end users such as the governments that have announced
their intent to migrate to OpenDocument.

I am of course open to refinement of the proposal.

Best regards,