interop profile draft: formulas in ODF 1.1

[Hanssens Bart <Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be>]

Now the big question: what do we do with formulas ?

In today's world, ODF 1.1 implementations supporting formulas are roughly using two different "families"
- oooc: (with or without prefix)
- msoxl:

And of course there's the upcoming OpenFormula...


So what are we going to say in the Interoperability Profile:

1) nothing at all, leaving it as it is (while it really is an interop issue today)
2.1) add a clause that interoperable applications SHOULD be able to read and understand both oooc and msoxl, and can write out one or the other ? 
2.2) ... SHALL be able ?
3) 2.1 or 2.2 with in addition OpenFormula of: 
4) only talk about SHALL / SHOULD support OpenFormula (which isn't a standard yet)
5) add a clause that they SHOULD support as many as possible (makes it worse, IMHO)

If 2.1), 2.2) or 3):

a) don't specify it any further than that (not much as improvement, but better than nothing, me thinks)
b) point to some (perhaps implementation specific) notes / specification specifying the formulas
c.1) designate a certain implementation to be the oooc: formula reference implementation + another implementation to be the msoxl: reference implementation
c.2) point to one implementation supporting both styles to be the formula reference implementation


Not sure if we can do c), but in reality that probably translates into
c1) OOo 3.x for oooc: - MS-Office 200x for msoxl:
c2) a 'smaller' implementation like KSpread, Gnumeric



Best regards,

Bart