Re: [office] some answers regarding drawing comments

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Chris Nokleberg <cnokleberg@tonicsystems.com> said:
> I'm fine with that, but I just want everyone to be clear that if
> OpenOffice were to change their code to comply with the clarified
> spec, it *will* break some existing documents. 
...
> For this issue and the possible change of using degrees for
> draw:transform, I suggest adding some way that implementations can
> determine which version of ODF a document uses. For example, a
> mandatory "version" attribute on the root would suffice. I suppose
> using namespace with an updated version suffix for changed attributes
> and elements would work too, although that would be harder on
> implementors.

If you really want to identify a change in version, then
changing the version number in the namespace is probably
the way to go. That is, after all, what the version number is there for.

Perhaps for this issue, and for changing some of the angle
measures to degrees, we should bump the namespace version
minor number.  If we change the version #, I propose waiting for these
changes until v1.2, and then include them in 1.2, along with a namespace
version number change.
I agree that this would be a pain for the implementors.  On the other
hand, perhaps a version bump this soon would help them iron out
kinks in version number handling.

A related issue is that we could add metadata for something like
"generated-by", which would a string identifying the specific generating
application including its version number (e.g., "OpenOffice.org 2.0.3").
Then if an application turns out to have a bug, other applications can
detect who sent it and compensate if necessary.  You could even have a
single "corrector" application that ran through all files, fixing them
only if necessary.  Obviously this is a bad idea to do often,
but it might save some user.

--- David A. Wheeler