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Subject: Re: [office-comment] Committee Draft 01 of ODF 1.2: Formula specificationmissing (change of modal verb and conformance requirement)
Jesper Lund Stocholm <4a4553504552@gmail.com> wrote on 02/23/2009 08:28:42 AM: > > As you put it yourself, "using stuff outside of the spec is a nuclear > death ray to interop" (my paraphrasing of your words). > I knew that phrase would come back to haunt me some day... The point is not that nuclear death ray's are intrinsically and always bad, but that they are over-kill for most tasks. Most often a far more modest tool will solve the problem more elegantly and with fewer risks of an adverse outcome. You can slice a loaf of bread with a knife, or with a chainsaw. Both will work. But you are unlikely to lose a leg if you make an error with a bread knife. Same thing with extensions to ODF. I acknowledge that extensions have a role to play, but we need to craft them in a way which they can solve problems and be safe in the context of editable office documents, which intrinsically must deal with versioning, embedded code, metadata, digital signatures, copy/paste semantics of document data, within and between documents, round-trip editing, etc. Simply saying, "add extensions wherever you like" is bad engineering since it does not solve the real problem of extensibility. It simply provides a nuclear death ray gun and tells the implementor (and the users) "Be careful with that, guys". I think we ought to do more than that. -Rob
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