Requirement

[Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

+NAME
Rick Jelliffe

+CONTACT
rjelliffe@allette.com.au

+CATEGORY (select one or more from below)
formatting 

+SCOPE (select one or more from below)
text/presentation

+USE CASE

The dominant technology for publishing is HTML and CSS.  An ODF application user needs to
be able to generate high quality HTML and to be able to import HTML pages and round-trip
them without loss.

Therefore, ODF needs to support round-tripping of all HTML and CSS features, to some level.


+DESCRIPTION

ODF should be audited against both HTML 5 (or the most recent version) and CSS2 (to pick
a reasonable base that would not burden developers), with the purpose of identifying any
features that cannot be round-tripped with minimal information loss. (I.e. so that the
HTML/CSS in resembles the HTML/CSS produced.)  

This is not an application issue, it is an issue of ODF having the necessary slots for the
information.

Once identified, ODF should have markup added to allow all these features to be
round-tripped. If recourse is made to some generic mechanism, then an annex to 
ODF should state the method of using these, so that developers do things in the same
way (i.e. so that if a document goes  HTML -> Tool 1 -> ODF -> Tool 2 -> HTML then the 
beginning and ending HTML have highly equivalent markup, and no information loss.

Here are two examples:

1) CSS2 provides aural stylesheet properties.* I could find no equivalent in the ODF 1.2 
draft, yet they are clearly a useful accessibility feature. 

2) CSS2 provides a generated content features.** I could find no equivalent in the ODF 1.2
(though I am not certain it is not there under some name I did not search for.)

* http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html
** http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/generate.html