Confirmation Flavors: #4 Legal Interop-Breaking Change

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

This is a fake example that was inspired by a misunderstanding between what a UI showed and what was actually in the ODF:

1. An ODF document contains references to companion material that is outside of the package but is located in proximity to the package's location via relative references.

2. Processor Q accepts the document and some minor editing is done.  Nothing involving the links to external material is touched.

3. When the document is saved with the changes, the links to the external material have been replaced by absolute URLs to the locations on the specific file system.

This breaks the interchange of the document and the companion material by transfer in a Zip (or tar or other archive format) to another user.

This is an interoperability situation, there being nothing in the ODF specification about whether links are rewritten or not, and when it is important to preserve relative (or absolute) links to maximize interoperability and successful interchange.  The problem of link adjustment when a document is moved is not a new situation and there is considerable practice around how to resolve links (often attempting to retry with relative links when absolute ones fail).

 - Dennis

POSTSCRIPT

[The particular example I based this on did not in fact have the defect I describe to illustrate this flavor.  However, a PDF produced from (2) did have absolute file-system links instead of the relative links incorporated in the ODF document.  This reinforced the assumption, based on UI behavior, that the relative URIs had been rewritten to absolute ones.  Inspection of the ODF revealed that they had not.  Unfortunately, the Processor Q UI made it appear as though links are converted to absolute, file-system-based links when apparently it always manufactures relative links when it can.]

Dennis E. Hamilton
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