Re: [office] Conforming OpenDocument Text Document, etc.

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi Rob,

On 03/15/09 22:49, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 1.4.2.3 Conforming OpenDocument Text Document
> 
> (D3) A conforming OpenDocument Text Document shall meet all requirements 
> of a Conforming OpenDocument Document, as well as the following additional 
> requirements:
> 
> (D3.1) The <office:document> element shall have an office:mimetype 
> attribute with the value "application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text".
> (D3.2) If the document is OpenDocument package then it shall contains a 
> mimetype stream containing the string "
> application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text".
> (D3.3) If the document is an OpenDocument package and it is stored as a 
> file, then the name of the file shall have the extension ".odt".

While it is of course reasonable to use that extension, I also do have 
some concerns making its use mandatory. In practice, users choose the 
extension. The applications are only making (reasonable) suggestions. 
Which means that users can choose arbitrary names, and in particular 
could decide to not use any extension at all.

With this clause a conforming document further may become a 
non-conforming one by just changing its name with an arbitrary 
application. For example, if I download an ODF document and decide to 
omit the extension for whatever reason, then this document suddenly is 
not conforming any longer, although no bit has changed in the document 
itself.

 From a pure technical perspective, I would say that the name of a file 
is a property of the file system rather than of the file itself, and 
that we in a definition of a file format can only set up requirements 
for properties or content of the files.

My suggestion therefore is that we include the recommendation to use odt 
as extension (or ott in case of a template), but turn this into a 
informal note.


> (D3.4) It shall contain only elements and attributes which are described 
> in the sections corresponding to the "Text" column of Appendix D "Core 
> Feature Sets".

I think what is essential regarding text documents is that the element 
contained in <office:body> is <office:text>.

I don't feel very comfortable using a reference to Appendix D here. 
First of all, this appendix would have to be reworked, because it so far 
has not been updated to include ODF 1.2 features. Furthermore, I believe 
that no one has paid a lot of attention to this appendix in the past. It 
was an informative appendix that should give some advice what features 
one could expect or not expect to find in the various document types, 
but it was not meant to be a differentiator between conformance and non 
conformance. Which means that probably no one has ever complained if she 
or he is not fine with a particular choice made there.

Which means that if we want to use this appendix in a normative way, we 
would have to spend some time on reviewing an adapting it. This appears 
to be some effort to me, and further may conflict with similar work 
planed in the OIC TC.

My suggestion therefor is that we include into the ODF 1.2 conformance 
clauses only the sub element of <office:body> that a particular document 
type must use, but that we revisit the topic when we have made more 
experience with this in OIC TC. For ODF 1.2, we could say:

(D3.4) The <office:body> element shall contain a <office:text> child 
element.


These two comments apply to the other document types, too.

I'm fine with the remaining proposals and in general support the idea of 
having conforming targets for the individual document types.

Best regards

Michael

-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
Sun Microsystems GmbH             Nagelsweg 55
D-20097 Hamburg, Germany          michael.brauer@sun.com
http://sun.com/staroffice         +49 40 23646 500
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