Re: [office-metadata] Suggested Changes on the Metadata proposal

[marbux <marbux@gmail.com>]

On 6/27/07, Svante Schubert <Svante.Schubert@sun.com> wrote:

Greetings!

IX) Dropping paragraph about preserved content of text:meta-field

Asked to drop the following section:
"The generated content of a <text:meta-field> element SHALL be preserved
upon each "save" operation to facilitate use of a document with an
application that does not support generation of content from metadata."

As the text:meta-field chapter will be part of the field chapter of the
main spec, there exist already some default behavior for fields.
e.g. "The content of the element is the textual representation of the
current field value as it would be displayed or printed."

It questionable we need a special preservation application behavior for
text:meta-field.

The language you suggest dropping includes a mandatory requirement of metadata preservation. But the language you quote from the text:meta-field chapter includes no such mandatory requirement. Doing away with metadata preservation requirements seems to be the unifying theme of your post. 

The effect, of course, is to allow Sun even more discretion to break interoperability with other applications, as it has already done with its applications' in regard to destroying foreign elements and attributes, which were expressly designed for interoperability purposes, and by parking a host of Sun eXtensions to ODF in the OOo namespace rather than submitting them to the TC for specification and standardization.  

Svante, I can well imagine that you were ordered to submit these proposed changes and that doing so made you nauseus. Nonetheless, I thank you for bringing Sun's hostility to interoperability out into the open.