Re: [office-metadata] Groups - ODF-Metadata-Proposal-22August2007 (07-08-22-ODF-Metadata-Proposal.odt) uploaded

[marbux <marbux@gmail.com>]

Title: OASIS Open Office Specification

On 22 Aug 2007 20:35:51 -0000, patrick@durusau.net <patrick@durusau.net > wrote:

Greetings!

After much hard work by all concerned I am pleased to announce the final
version of the Metadata Proposal has now been filed!

Special thanks to all the member of the SC who made this possible.

It's a spectacular achievement, Patrick. Only a single requirement in the whole document and even it uses the undefined term, "mandatory." But did you get Sun's ok for having any mandatory requirements at all?


In reviewing the document, I was struck by how adroitly its authors managed to avoid using defined requirements terms. Only 7 occurrences of "may" and 3 of "should," and even those negated by not being placed in boldface. See ODF 
1.2 draft, section 1.2 (terms to be interpreted as defined by ISO Directives only "if they appear in bold letters." Creative writing teachers may counsel avoidance of the passive voice. 
See e.g., Wikipedia ("Many English educators and usage guides, such as The Elements of Style, discourage the use or overuse of the passive voice, seeing it as unnecessarily verbose (when the agent is included in a by phrase), or as obscure and vague (when it is not)." <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice>.

But hey, Strunk & White weren't writing file format standards, were they? In standards work, the passive voice is the least confining voice, akin to elastic graph paper that allows data outliers  to be stretched into the right position to support the hypothesis. 

Indeed, it is obvious that studious avoidance of the active voice is precisely what enabled the document's authors to avoid having to make all those hard decisions about what requirements  terms should apply to all those sentences. 
E.g., the very first sentence: 

> "Metadata in OpenDocument format is expressed using the model of the W3C Resource Description Framework [RDF-CONCEPTS]." 

Notice how the difficult choice between use of the mandatory "SHALL" and the permissive "SHOULD" was avoided by resort to the passive voice? "Is expressed" is so much easier to write than "implementers SHALL express" or "SHOULD express," precisely because of the ambiguity induced by the  passive voice; to use the active voice would actually require reaching consensus on troublesome and divisive topics like interoperability. 


And this same bit of magic was worked on practically every sentence in the document! I had no idea it was even possible to string together so many consecutive passive sentences.  

I bow before masters of the art. I can only imagine the years of work it took to produce a document with only a single mandatory requirement. And who knows? Maybe the TC will get rid of that requirement too and we can have a  metadata proposal entirely free of mandatory requirements. 

Kudos to all who participated. It is an incredible piece of work. You have successfully quashed the forces of Interoperability. 


Best regards,

Marbux