Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] My perspective. Extensions

Gordon MacGinitie wrote:

> I urge that the forwarding of unknown features be considered a violation
> of interoperability.

That is a pretty smart method of niping it in the bud. If there isn't a
serious reason to preserve unknown features, I vote for this "violation
act"

What is described is an historic and well-known method of vendor lock-in, i.e. including undocumented features unavailable from otherwise conformal competitors. The point made is to forbid this behavior. Obviously, this behavior is at the heart of non-interoperability between office suite applications today. We would do well to formally address the problem, don't you think?

I suggest that this group's charter should endorse this concept [forwarding of undocumented and thus unknown features] as a guiding principal for interoperability. May I suggest that our OIIC TC Charter should state something like [wordsmiths definitely encouraged]

Inclusion of an unknown feature breaks interoperability and therefore, if such features are inserted into an ODF document, the result is no longer an ODFdocument. Thus such behavior should [issue a warning to the user | not be done | be flagged as fail | be considered as non-interoperable behavior].

An unknown feature is defined as any content placed into an ODF document by any method without first providing or making known a public and also an unrestricted [able to be used by all without royalty or use restriction] and operable implementation of the method used being publicly and widely available to all users and implementors of ODF.

If this is not part of the ODF standard now [which I suspect but do not know to be the case], then this interoperability concept should be a suggestion for revision to the appropriate TC IMHO. Otherwise we may indeed see lock-in history repeated and any efforts thwarted.

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