RE: [office] Thoughts on ODF-Next

[David LeBlanc <dleblanc@exchange.microsoft.com>]

Andreas said:

> > > Now if the feature were implemented using foreign elements no such 
> > > problem would exist and if the spec does not change it would be 
> > > trivial to change the element name/namespace to match the approved standard.

> > That is one approach, but not one that we (the ODF TC) have any 
> > ability to mandate.


> While I realize that we can't mandate that and in fact have no control
> over whether a vendor calls their format ODF1.3 or whatever, I think we
> at least should not encourage that behaviour as suggested.

Just my personal opinion - it is a sticky problem. If no one has attempted to implement the standard, then we have no real idea whether it is a complete or correct standard. But implementing a draft, especially in a non-beta product has perils, including having the standard change out from under you. We hit some of this in the signature work - the (proposed 1.2) standard reflects some practices that were incorporated into implementations built on the draft. Some of that was non-optimal, and resulted in compromises in the standard. Some of it helped inform the standard and was beneficial. Overall, I was glad there was an implementation to draw from - made the result less ambiguous, even if there were also some drawbacks. At the end of the day, I don't think there is one right answer - there's pros and cons to each approach.