Re: [office] preferred view mode upon opening document

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

 > 2. What about a sentence on the specification like: "It is 
> recommended that all custom view mode specification documentation is
> made available to enhance documents interoperability" ?
> 

The issue Warren raises is a general issue, not exclusive to view mode 
alone.  One way to address this globally is two add two things to the ODF 
text:

1) Where ever something like this occurs, explicitly call the behavior 
"implementation-defined".  Use that as a uniform label of areas where ODF 
allows implementations to implement their own behaviors.  So we say 
something like "Additional view modes may be used, but they shall be 
prefixed by a namespace qualifier not defined by this standard.  The 
behavior of such view modes is implementation-defined".

2) Then in the conformance clause, we add language like:  "An 
implementation shall be accompanied by a document that defines all 
implementation-defined and locale-specific characteristics and all 
extensions."  (That is the language directly out of ISO/IEC 9899:1999 C 
Programming Language.  You can see here what one implementation created to 
define its "implementation-defined" features:  
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/C-Implementation.html

We don't need that exact language, but you get the idea.  A standard can 
allow implementation-defined behavior, but can also require that these be 
documented.  If we're going to do this, I'd rather we do it pervasively in 
the standard rather than just in the view mode attribute.

What do TC members think? 

Regards,

-Rob