RE: [office-comment] ODF security hazard? (ODF all versions)

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

Moving the discussion to the office list, where it belongs...


"Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org> wrote on 02/21/2009 
05:32:30 PM:

> 
> However, I think Postel's law is a great argument in favor of 
predictable,
> permissive foreign-element handling.
> 
>  - Dennis
> 

Indeed, it is a good argument for an application handling such content. 
But it is a poor argument for allowing such markup in conformant 
documents.  It simply doesn't follow. Look at HTML, by analogy.  Most web 
pages are not valid HTML.  Many are not even well formed.  Should we then 
allow invalid and malformed documents to be considered conformant HTML?  I 
don't think so.  But the presence of such documents on the web is a good 
argument for designing a web browser to be robust when given such 
non-conforming documents.  You could certainly specify such a robustness 
requirement in the conformance clause for an HTML processor.

-Rob