Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] Interoperability versus Conformity

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

marbux <marbux@gmail.com> wrote on 06/09/2008
07:25:26 PM:

> 
> The major barrier I foresee for such an effort would be in persuading
> all of the major players to work from the same script, i.e., Sun,
IBM,
> Microsoft, W3C, and the major web browser developers for both the
> desktop and mobile devices.  For example, the major web browser
> developers are not all that keen on supporting XHTML2, preferring
> HTML5 (WHATWG). (IMHO, HTML5 may be the cat's meow for browser
> developers, but is severely crippled as a standard for the
> interoperable exchange of documents among web app editors, lacking
> such basic defined elements as table of contents, footnotes, and
> footnote calls. Likewise, such definition is also lacking in CSS,
> which is in any event commonly implemented in site-wide template files
> rather than at the document level.)
> 

Paul, this is not JTC1, and the proposed TC cannot
change a single line of the ODF standard.  So I think the vast majority
of your concerns are misdirected in terms of the present discussion.  In
particular, rewriting ODF in terms of CDF is most certainly out of scope
for this new TC.

But I'm all in favor of looking at what other groups
have done, including the W3C, in the area of interoperability.  I
sent out some links earlier to some of their practice papers and work in
test case generation.  

Remember, ODF exists.  It is an OASIS Standard.
 It is an ISO Standard.  It is supported and implemented by all
the major players in this industry, including IBM, Google, Sun, Microsoft,
Novell, Corel, as well as several important open source projects (and apologies
to everyone I missed).  The question before us is how to improve interoperability
in the world that exists, not to continually lament that world and pine
for one that does not exist.

I'm not here to fail.  I'm not here to tilt at
windmills.  I'm here to apply my engineering know-how and work with
other enthusiastic and talented volunteers to move ODF interoperability
forward one small step at a time.  This is the price of success.  If
ODF had failed, then no one would care about interoperability.  If
ODF had few implementations or little vendor support, then none of this
would matter.  But with recent announcements in the industry, ODF
is positioned now to be the most-widely deployed document format around,
supported by every major word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics
package on every platform.  The success in adoption of ODF, around
the world, coupled with the strong user demand and subsequent vendor support
makes interoperability work more important now than ever.  We're only
having this discussion because ODF won.  

Regards,

-Rob