RE: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile

[Cherie Ekholm <cheriee@exchange.microsoft.com>]

This profile is not in spirit or actuality equivalent to PDF/A for many reasons. PDF/A is a vertical developed by and for a very specific market of PDF users, most notably national archivists, courts and DoD. The goal of PDF/A-1 was to preserve a fixed representation of a file that would be identical to the document that was saved today whether that document was opened 1, 2, 5, 10 or 50 years down the road in a conforming reader. PDF/A-1 was never a "profile" of the full standard, because a full international PDF standard did not exist at the time PDF/A was created.

Some of the confusion may stem from the way PDF/A-1 has been coopted since it was standardized - because PDF/A-1 was the only non-commercial print PDF standard for more than 3 years, many governments, institutions, and corporations began mandating its use for everything PDF and it now has a huge coalition of support driving its adoption. Added to that is the fact that introducing the full international PDF standard after several other vertical PDF standards were created has, as Rob suggested, created a great deal of confusion in the marketplace. No one except a few implementers has a clue what to do with ISO 32000-1, the full international PDF standard adopted in late 2008.

(Purely as an aside, those of us working on the PDF-related standards are well aware of the confusion and potential confusion of the whole alphabet soup. Educational efforts are underway, and some consolidation is expected in the future.)

Back to the Interop Profile. It would be perfectly appropriate to have a profile that, for instance, prohibited the embedding of macros in the interest of enhancing portability, if the profile was for a vertical that targeted portability or archiving. Or so says the charter of OIC and so seem to say the explanations Rob and Bart have provided. That does not appear, however, to be what this profile under discussion does. This profile seems to broadly target interoperability among office suites. 

Interoperability is great. Advocating it is the basic charter of this TC. However, the charter also specifically limits creating normative profiles to verticals and horizontals. The entirety of the market, by definition, is neither of those.  I think the OIC should be publishing these as informative recommendations to support interoperability, and the items in this profile should be pushed to the ODF TC to deal with if they haven't already. Bart's wish list should be achievable with something more in keeping with a technical report or best practices guide. Having something like that for implementers to use when questions arise automatically confers a certain authority when it comes from the TC.

Cherie

-----Original Message-----
From: Hanssens Bart [mailto:Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be] 
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 11:48 AM
To: dennis.hamilton@acm.org; Cherie Ekholm
Cc: oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile


Well, I don't mind calling it a "best practice guide" if the members of this TC would be more at ease with it, rather than Profile...

However, I do believe that we should use conformance clauses, since at some practical level, implementers would want to test if their products is in line with this interop "thingie". If not, we end up (*again*) running in circles because there is no specification / thingie that is somehow "normative", or has practical statements

In the ideal world, every implementer would have extremely detailed implementers notes and one could derive a common denominator from them + start discussing the differences an agree on a solution within this TC.
But this world isn't Utopia...

Personally, I prefer one big document (which would still leave a large degree of freedom, since it - for instance - won't require implementers to support tables, but if they do, they should do it like outlined in X, Y and Z), rather than a bunch of separate "interoperability notes" (similar to CERT advisories).

If implementers would prefer the latter, fine with me...


In short, I want:

* a "thingie" that is practical
* fast to update
* one should be able to derive tests from it
* has some degree of authority (like community draft / spec)



Bart

PS: nice to have some discussion on this topic ________________________________________
From: Dennis E. Hamilton [dennis.hamilton@acm.org]
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 6:59 PM
To: 'Cherie Ekholm'
Cc: oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile

+1

I believe the use of normative language, a defined conformance target and conformance clauses in a document that is not expected to go past Committee Specification is inappropriate and not in keeping with the scope and identified deliverables of the OIC TC.

 - Dennis

PS: That's especially a concern when matters that are not now and not expected to be in-scope for ODF itself are introduced (e.g., what someone can or cannot do using a product UI, and how a feature is observable by and governed by users at all).  Although those may be quite worthy of address in some venue or another, it seems to me that we have to be very careful about how OIC speaks on such matters, assuming it is appropriate to speak as OIC at all under whatever the authority of the OASIS OIC TC is.

-----Original Message-----
From: Cherie Ekholm [mailto:cheriee@exchange.microsoft.com]
<http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oic/201003/msg00028.html>
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 09:54
To: Hanssens Bart; oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile

I understand wanting to clarify the 1.1 standard - it often happens that after a standard is released and implementers start using it that areas that need clarification are exposed. I'd agree that this can be a detriment to interoperability.

[ ... ]

If the idea here is to put out a best practices guide or best practices profile as Bart says, why not call this just that?

Cherie


-----Original Message-----
From: Hanssens Bart [mailto:Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be] <http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oic/201003/msg00027.html>
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 5:17 PM
To: Cherie Ekholm; oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile



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