Re: [office-metadata] Backward compatibility mechanism (achievedby the preserving of information not understood)

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Rob,

robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:

>
> I believe the former was intended.  But keep in mind that ODF 1.0 says 
> that preserving foreign content is only a "SHOULD".   If an 
> implementation does not do this, and strips out unknown content, 
> possibly metadata, when writing, then round-tripping of documents 
> between semantically-rich and non-semantically-rich editors would be 
> suboptimal.  So I'd recommend this use case to encourage us to think 
> about changing the "SHOULD" to "MUST", or suggest other conventions 
> for allowing such information not to be lost when exchanging documents 
> among a heterogenous set of editors.
>
OK, yes, that makes sense. Unknown content could well include metadata, 
since there is no universal convention to indicate metadata.

So the use case would be round-tripping between editors that include 
"metadata" that may or may not be recognized as "metadata" between the 
different editors. Even within ODF conformant editors, since some may 
support more  "metadata" than others.

Does that catch your drift?

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

> -Rob
>
> Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net> wrote on 06/28/2006 09:35:34 AM:
>
> > Greetings!
> >
> > Can someone clarify the use case:
> >
> > Backward compatibility mechanism (achieved by the preserving of
> > information not understood)?
> >
> > ODF already specifies that information that is not understood is to be
> > preserved.
> >
> > Or is this a case of where ODF defined an element and then later
> > re-defined an element and metadata would signal which definition should
> > be applied? And failing that, simply leave the element alone?
> >
> > 


-- 
Patrick Durusau
Patrick@Durusau.net
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!