Re: [office] Conformance Clause proposal, Version 8

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Monday 09 February 2009, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> Because file extensions are not defined normatively

They are, actually, but not in OpenDocument - they are defined normatively at IANA,
based on a submission by this TC.

> application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text+ext.

I don't like this - it will break existing applications. And I haven't seen a justification
of _why_ we should do this. What is the goal there?

> I suppose one could decorate the office:version attribute too, with
> something like office:version="1.2 ext".  

Again, I have to ask about the purpose of this.

On the one hand we are saying that there is no real need for foreign elements/attributes
(my examples of existing foreign attributes have been answered with better
conformant ways of doing it), only for maybe style-*-properties extension,
and on the other hand we want to define a whole class of documents
(including a different mimetype and a different extension) for documents
with foreign elements/attributes? This doesn't make sense to me.

Unless I'm missing something, there's a huge contradiction between
"extensions are not needed" and "let us define extended documents".

Or is this about style-*-properties extensions? I have to name koffice-produced
files *.odxt just because I save a harmless koffice:frame-behavior-on-new-page
style attribute in the style properties, and because of this file extension/mimetype
those documents will not be opened by any of the existing OpenDocument
processors out there? This makes no sense. We are not changing the mimetype
for each version of ODF either, even though the contents are slightly different,
that's the whole point of XML's extensibility: a ODF-1.1 processor can give a shot
at parsing a ODF-1.2 document, so it can also give a shot at parsing a ODF-1.2
document "with a few extensions", can't it? A new mimetype prevents that completely
(and will confuse users for no apparent benefit).

Let us define one thing: a document is conformant if it validates against
the schema (=> easy yes/no result), and in the schema we allow extensions
in style-*-properties and metadata.

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).