Re: [office] Status of list discussions/Suggestion how to proceed

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Monday 26 March 2007, Florian Reuter wrote:
> Hi Lars,
> 
> understood. To be clear. For me 
> (F1) Backward compatibility with ODF1.0/ODF1.1 (Loading an ODF 1.1 doc into an ODF 1.2 application)
> (F2) Backward compatibility with "legacy" ODF docs arose from the fact that ODF1.1 wasn't clearly specified
> is very important. The only technical solution I see today is to associate counter and styles. If there is a different
> way to achieve (F1) and (F2) then I'm happy to drop the style<=>counter relationship in the proposal.
> 
> So again. If the TC states that (F1) and (F2) are not important than it's OK for me.

Well, nobody is ever going to say "compatibility is not important".
I think the question is more: at which cost?
Compatibility at any cost (to the point of making ODF a mirror of the OOXML complexity?),
or compatibility "where it makes sense"?
I personally think we want the latter, but not the former.

Backward compatibility with ODF1.0/1.1 documents should be kept where possible, 
obviously, but especially -not- in areas where the specification wasn't clear, or 
where the specification turns out not to make sense.

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).