Re: [office] Conformance Definitions

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:

> There are two products defined by the ODF standard:  documents and 
> producers/consumers.  My reading of Michael's conformance proposal is that 
> all conformant ODF 1.0 documents will remain conformant ODF 1.2 documents, 
> and a subset of conformant ODF 1.0 documents will be conformant to the 
> strict class of ODF 1.2 documents.  So no user of ODF 1.0 who has 
> conformant ODF 1.0 documents will see their documents become 
> non-conformant.

I don't think so. In ODF 1.0 (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) is written:

"1.5Document Processing and Conformance

Documents that conform to the OpenDocument specification may contain
elements and attributes not specified within the OpenDocument schema.
Such elements and attributes must not be part of a namespace that is
defined within this specification and are called foreign elements and
attributes."

but the current Michael's proposal states for "Conforming OpenDocument
Documents":

"(D1.1.1) If the XML root element is <office:document-content>,
<office:document-styles>, <office:document-meta> or
<office:document-settings>, then it shall be valid with respect to the
schema defined by this specification."

But if you look at the latest schemas available at

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/30857/OpenDocument-schemas-v1.2-draft8d.zip

you will see that this schema allows foreign elements/attributes only in
office:meta element and no where else -- which is the difference from
ODF 1.0 where such elements/attributes are allowed everywhere -- spec
says that they are removed before validation against schema takes place.

> Also, any conformant ODF 1.0 document or application, if unchanged, will 
> remain for all eternity a conformant ODF 1.0 document or applications.  We 
> can't take that away.

But users usually expect clear migration path from version N to version
N+1 of some format. And there is no direct migration path for foreign
elements/attributes nor there was warning in ODF1.0 that such feature
will be dropped in the next versions.

>> If there should be strict conformance in ODF to support simplistic
>> applications that do not have to take care about foreign extensions then
>> there should be also another conformance level which will allow foreign
>> elements/attributes and will guarantee roundtripping of them.
> 
> OK.  I believe Michael's proposal has that.  He has two conformance 
> classes for documents, one which is strict and once which is merely 
> labeled "conformant" (maybe we should call it "loose"?).  

I think that problem is that conformance definition here refers to the
schema which doesn't allow foreign elements/attributes. Might be this
was not intentional? Might be this nuance was lost during evaluating
NVDL and then dropping it for now? I don't know.

			Jirka

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