Conformance Definitions - Procedural Objection

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Michael,

I have examined your 2009-01-28 Version 7 document.  I cannot figure out in all of that material, what part is the proposal that you are making in the 2009-01-28 list posting on the topic.

1. I would like to see a specific, self-contained proposal document that contains the precise proposal you wish to discuss.  We need a concrete, specific text that is precisely the proposal to know exactly what we are talking about, and we need a week to let it set in.

2. I would like to understand the policy of this TC with regard to breaking changes and the ability to adapt gracefully between ODF 1.0/1.1 documents and ODF 1.2 document in both directions (assuming that there is no essential functionality that is unavailable downlevel).  I note that there have been breaking changes that seem to have no useful purpose other than making 1.2 more complicated and make preservation of 1.0/1.1 documents more difficult (and use of older implementations problematic for processing of so-called 1.2 documents that don't use any 1.2-specific features).

With regard to interoperability, I don't understand the anxiety over foreign elements when the minimum requirement for a conforming processor is that it can fail to provide any interpretation for an arbitrary large set of features under the so-called strict schema.  That strikes me as a far more significant barrier to interoperability than the careful use of foreign elements (e.g., what RDF looks like to a down-level processor and any "1.2"-asserting processor that doesn't support it).

It strikes me that it is far more interesting to deal with how interoperability happens even under strict conformance rather than tinkering with features of ODF 1.1 that are not broken in any way but that are proposed to be broken by the 1.2 "fix."



 - Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
mailto:Dennis.Hamilton@acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 
http://NuovoDoc.com http://ODMA.info/dev/ http://nfoWorks.org