Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] Proposed Use case -- Interoperability in vertical and horizontal ODF markets

["Peter Dolding" <oiaohm@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 1:44 AM, <robert_weir@us.ibm.com> wrote:

Simon Calderson <caldersons@yahoo.co.uk> wrote on 06/26/2008 10:55:29 AM:

>
> Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com>:
> > 2008/6/26  <robert_weir@us.ibm.com>:
> > >
> > > In any case, the ODF standard does speak to foreign elements and
> attributes,
> > > so an exhaustive test suite will of course include examples of
> this feature.
> > >  Since the ODF standard says that such content should be
> preserved, we would
> > > check to see if that recommendation was observed and issue a
> "warning" if it
> > > was not.
> >
> > 1.5 requires them to be preserved. That's a fail not a warning
>
> 1.5 lists that as a "may" here - you are allowed to throw away non-
> ODF content, and indeed that's what OOo does.
>
> I'm really unsure of how this is an interoperability issue, though.
>

When Paul talks about "round trip" interop you need to look very carefully.  This has roots in the former OpenDocument Foundation's failed "da Vinci" project, which was an attempt to write an ODF plugin for MS Word.  They planned on storing proprietary MS Office formats as opaque markup associated with the ODF content.  So, if Word had a list style that could not be represented perfectly in ODF, then they would make a best-fit mapping to ODF and then also store the original Word list definition as essentially a blob in a foreign namespace.  So this information would be unusable to anyone else in the word, except to the da Vinci plugin, who could look at it when the document returned into MS Word.

Lets be simpler we here are a TC.  We don't give a stuff about non documented stuff.   If your application cannot render correctly with information in the ODF standard then its not up to spec plain and simple.  If we can mangle render of a document by removing stuff not documented in standard its still not upto spec.  Black and White NO GREY PLEASE.  Grey is just loop holes and problems.

Same applies to all TC's.   Microsoft complained badly over the first html acid test not using there closed source extensions to correct errors in there renders.   If ODF TC allowed these closed and non documented bits to affect there testing they are no longer a TC.

Peter Dolding