Re: [office] List Proposal Vote Deadline on Wednesday

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

For some reason the voting system will not let me vote "abstain", so I'll record my "abstain" vote here on the mailing list.

Why?  Well, I want to make sure that (1) a SINGLE proposal is accepted (for interoperability's sake), and that (2) the accepted proposal is sufficient for current and future users.  As far as I can tell, EITHER solution will be able to fully handle today's documents as well as those of the future, including MS Word binary files.  So I'm voting "abstain", and will be delighted with the acceptance of EITHER approach.

To my understanding, Oliver/Thomas (Sun/KOffice)'s proposal uses triples (ID, style, level) to designate numbers, while Florian's proposal uses the (style, level) tuples with an optional style-override markup if needed.  Florian's approach is more similar to the approach taken by MS-Word, which makes translation of existing Word documents slightly easier.  The Oliver/Thomas approach is more complex, which is a negaive.  It's not exactly the same as any current applications, which is also a negative, but since it's coming FROM two implementors, that's less of a big deal... especially since the proposal doesn't seem that hard to do.  But the Oliver/Thomas approach seems to me to be much more flexible and capable.  As far as I can tell, the Oliver/Thomas approach should be able to easily represent any document from MS Word, as well as some really complex numbering schemes.  Since both models appear to meet the needs of Office applications, I think either makes sense.

I'd like to see WHATEVER approach is chosen implemented soon by at least one implementor, to make sure that there are no unforeseen issues.  In this case I think it's unlikely to be a problem with either approach.

My thanks to everyone for sticking things out to conclude with TWO workable solutions.  Two is a lot better than zero.

--- David A. Wheeler