Conformance Clauses and NVDL

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Dear TC members,

one of the action items we have to address before we can complete our
work on ODF 1.2 is a rework of the conformance clause section. This is
necessary to meet the requirements of the current OASIS TC process, 
which has been revised since ODF 1.1 was approved.

I have uploaded a proposal for reworked conformance clauses here:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/29454/conformance-definition-proposal.odt

Actually, the document contains multiple variants. What I did was to
take the ODF 1.1 conformance clauses, that I then reworked in multiple
steps. I call these iterations in the document.

The first iteration more or less reformulates what we had so far, but
aims to change the conformance definitions itself as little as possible.

The 2nd and 3rd iterations aim to simplify the conformance definition by
defining less variants and by omitting a few (very few) requirements.

My personal favorite is the third iteration, and I would like to use
that as basis for our discussion. What I'm particular interested in is
whether you think that this goes into the right direction, and which of
the things I omitted compared to first and second iteration should be
re-introduced. A soon as I know that my proposal goes into the right 
direction, I will move it into the Wiki.

On another but not unrelated topic: I would like propose that
we use NVDL for the inclusion of the MathML and XForms schemas. This
on the one hand would improve the ability to verify these parts of ODF
documents (right now, everything is allowed within an embedded math
object or an XForms model, what means that these parts are never
validated). But using NVDL would further resolve the issues we currently
have with RNG DTD compatibility. We may create a schema that itself is
DTD compatible together with a NVDL script that processes these parts of
the schema where we currently allow any content.

I have uploaded a first NVDL script here:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/29455/odf.nvdl

It probably requires some more work, but it shows already what
using NVDL would look like.

The use of NVDL requires a few adaptations of the schema, and there is a
dependency from the conformance clauses (and vice versa): If we still
want to differ between strict and non-strict documents, then we should
define that with the help of two NVDL scripts rather than with two
schemas. For that reason, I'm interested in knowing what the revised
conformance clauses will be before working on the details of the NVDL
script.

One last remark: NVDL is new to me. So, any support with further
developing the script is welcome.

Best regards

Michael


-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
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