Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] Caution and Disclaimer on Interoperability

[marbux <marbux@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 7:31 AM, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Only two comments Paul.
>
> 2008/6/12 marbux <marbux@gmail.com>:
>
>> You might consider the size of the mess that now has to be cleaned up
>> because the 800-pound gorillas never felt that the following
>> ISO/IEC/JTC 1 Directives requirement would never stop them from
>> getting whatever interoperability they wanted to be designated as
>> international standards:
>>
>> "Standards designed to facilitate interoperability need to specify
>> clearly and unambiguously the conformity requirements that are
>> essential to achieve the interoperability. Complexity and the number
>> of options should be kept to a minimum and the implementability of the
>> standards should be demonstrable."
>
> I can make sense of that, as guidance. I've added it to the definitions.
> <grin/> You take care of the gorillas.
>

 See the other threads on working towards common sense testable
> from 'pixel perfect'. I'd hate to see PDF mandated in ODF simply
> for test purposes?
> That would put a lot of strain on implementors where I don't think it's
> necessary?

I think it would be premature to develop it as a standard. To me, it's
more in the category of keeping in mind enough when doing the other
work to avoid creating bottlenecks that would get in the way of doing
it later. A "don't shut the door on this plausible feature if you can
avoid it" kind of thing. If it's a good idea, someone will pick up
that ball and run with it. If no one has both the energy and resources
for it, it ain't going to happen anyway. For me personally, there's a
40-year-old interop mess that needs cleaning up before I'd even think
about trying to make that one happen. I want to be able to round-trip
documents with anyone on the planet without data loss before I start
worrying about pixel perfect.

Now if anyone wants to work on my Star Ship Enterprise Outliner that
has 350 channels of satellite television available in each node and
does footnotes as well as numbered and hyperlinked tables of contents,
I might take a break from herding gorillas.  :-)


-- 
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>