OASIS Guidelines to Writing Conformance Clauses

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

Last year the OASIS Technical Advisory
Board (TAB) wrote up a "Guidelines to Writing Conformance Clauses".
 This was to support the new OASIS policy around conformance clauses:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php#specQuality

"A specification that is approved
by the TC at the Public Review Draft, Committee Specification or OASIS
Standard level must include a separate section, listing a set of numbered
conformance clauses, to which any implementation of the specification must
adhere in order to claim conformance to the specification (or any optional
portion thereof)."

This TC Process addition was added after
ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1 were approved.  ODF 1.2 will be enhanced to conform
to this new requirement.  Any discussion of ODF conformance properly
belongs on that discussion list, not here.

However, any formal deliverable of the
proposed OIIC TC will also be required to follow this conformance policy.
 In particular I'd draw your attention to the "Guidelines to
Writing Conformance Clauses" posted here:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/templates/TCHandbook/ConformanceGuidelines.html

It is this document which expresses
our drafting requirements for conformance.  Speculation on what the
W3C, the WTO,  the EC or the Interplanetary Interoperability Council
requires is irrelevant.

-Rob