RE: [office] Moving forward on Conformance - OIC Role

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

I saw these mentions of what OIC might do with regard to conformance and I
wanted to clarify my still-learning understanding of that.  

 1. The OIC cannot do anything about the conformance levels and the
normative statements of the ODF specification.  It also can't (well,
shouldn't) do anything that results in contradiction of the conformance
levels and normative statements of the ODF specification.

 2. In determining how to assess conformance, the OIC may discover areas
where the ODF specification is underspecified or inconsistent and report
those finding to the ODF TC.  There may also be discoveries of
misunderstandings and disagreements about the requirements among
implementers, and that can be reported to the ODF TC as well.  (My guess,
and only a guess, is that none of this is likely to coincide with current
ODF 1.2 development, based on the desired movement of ODF 1.2 toward OASIS
Standard and the early stage that OIC effort is in.) 

 3. Where the OIC may be valuable is in the area of optional normative
statements, where there are MAY, NEED NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT.  Also, there
may be something to do in regard to other optionality and discretionary
matters (maximum table dimensions, for example).  And, it may be valuable to
notice what implementations are doing, if anything, around places where the
ODF specification is silent or underspecified or apparently has left matters
to be determined by implementations.  
    3.1 In this case (with great caution where there is no explicit guidance
in the ODF Standard), the OIC might promulgate a profile that defines a
level of document, consumer, and producer for successful interoperable
usage.  Such a profile would presumably limit some optionality in order to
achieve the interoperability and might specify more about how interpretation
of unsupported provisions are to be handled under the profile.  
    3.2 I don't know that ODF TC concurrence would be required in this case.
Perhaps such a profile could move to OASIS Standard in its own right, even
though it is based on and completely dependent on a specific ODF standard.  
    3.3 Perhaps something that would be valuable for the establishment of a
profile is provision in the ODF specification of an agreed way to amend MIME
types and office:version values, or other metadata, to indicate the
additional protocol agreement that a document conforms to and should be
employed in its processing.
    3.4 I am making this all up.  The OIC has not looked at this, although I
am going to forward this note to that list also.

 4. I'm not sure about extensions.  I think that is not the business of the
OIC except to perhaps recognize the possible existence of any extensions in
common use among multiple implementations.  This strikes me as not something
for OIC to have its attention on in the near term.  

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM [mailto:Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM] 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200902/msg00034.html
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 08:30
To: robert_weir@us.ibm.com
Cc: office@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office] Moving forward on Conformance

Hi Rob,

thank you for this summary. I think it very well describes the situation.

What I would like to add here is what you said in another mail, that is, 
that we must also consider that some more work regarding conformance is 
done in the OIC TC.

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