Default Styles and Collaboration Profiles

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

The situation with default styles that Svante is concerned about opens up a number of issues around profiling, agreements among collaborators, and whether or not the ODF specification is too liberal in places to allow such agreements to be accomplished reliably.  Or not.

For broad application of ODF, it is clear that some features require a level of implementation-dependence and others might require implementation definition.

An open question is whether or not there is a way to support mechanical honoring (by implementations) of a profile agreement that satisfies a collaboration use case.  Historically, templates are the means for this, but there might not be enough control in the format to enable a standard way to accomplish it.  

It appears that this has to be more grounded in cases to see what principles would apply that allow both continued broad reach of the ODF specification and narrowing to collaboration profiles for some purpose.  Note that this would tend to restrict choice of implementations to ones that honor a profile requirement and, while that might be a means of qualifying implementations for a given collaborative situation, it seems to be rather far from the current state and any ability to qualify implementations in that respect.  

I'm stopping here.  This could easily turn into a boil the ocean problem.  I do think there need to be some limited use cases that are exemplars of practical requirements so the different ways they are achievable can be assessed and any need for a spectrum of practices and technical features explored.

 - Dennis

PS: In the "olden days" of the ISO Open Document Architecture (ODA), there was an application/document profile provision by which a document specified conditions on features that were usable in it.  That is different than a template, although it supported use as a template system as well.  (Nowadays, it would be done with some sort of schema that constrained the document structure, although the general document and schema structure would be well-specified.)  For laughs:
<http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm?csnumber=15926>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Document_Architecture> is not great in this case.  ODA was also victim to a format war of the "there shall be only one" variety, with the sort-of opponent being SGML.  Meanwhile, desktop publishing and office document WSYWIG-style editors took over.

PPS: I really just wanted to confirm that I did recover all my notes -- auto-saving of drafts worked -- following my computer crash (tied to something in Skype and my audio hardware/software, I think).