Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] Thoughts on interop

[Simon Calderson <caldersons@yahoo.co.uk>]

Dave Pawson wrote:

To relate these issues back to the topic at hand, I'm not sure why the output of an interop TC would be of genuine use to
end-users and ODF customers.


Ask a user who'se tried to lift documents from Office Suite A to
Office Suite B. I've cursed for many hours tidying up after such a transform.

Indirectly you could list a number of different types of
people. I understood that the audience would be those for whom the work
would be directly applicable, and I don't see that much if any of the
information output by the OIIC TC would be directly usable by office
users. Certainly, as an example, I think painting such information as a basis for
making purchasing decisions etc. is a recipe for vendor disinterest at
the very least.

Are office users the audience for ODF itself? I would assume not, for the most part (specific technologists aside).

In my opinion, the audience are those you expect to read through the TC
output, not those who you expect to (in)directly benefit. I think in that scope, the ODF TC and the ODF vendors/implementers are the primary audience. 


In my opinion, the output of any interop TC should be focussed primarily for the use of vendors to improve their implementations,


Why 'primarily' please?  It's possibly a lot of work for a vendor to
improve compliance. If they are the only target it's easy for them to ignore it.

The vendors are the ones effectively authoring the ODF; this isn't the
same situation as (e.g.) HTML where users are creating markup.. They are
the ones who are able to instigate positive change wrt. interop.

Different vendors are going to have different reasons to want to improve interop, and I'm not sure it would be fair to say that a vendor is "ignoring" interop if their application happens to do badly in tests that the OIIC TC produces. At the end of the day, they answer to their customers, and if interop is important to their customers then they will a. act on the output, but (more importantly) b. actively participate in OIIC TC.

Thanks.


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