Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] My perspective. display perferct?

["Stuart A. Yeates" <syeates@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 10:09 AM, David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/7/14 Bart Hanssens <bart.hanssens@skynet.be>:
>> Radoslav Dejanović wrote:
>
>>> I believe that is the point - we do not want applications to do any
>>> internal modifications of a document unless the user adds, modifies or
>>> deletes something. Input file should be exactly the same as the output
>>> file if there were no user interactions (we should consider spell
>>> checking as user interaction).
>
>> So, basically:
>> "when an application doesn't support an elements or an attribute that is
>> part of the ODF namespaces (or any namespace ?), the application shall
>> not change or remove said element or attribute (unless the parent is
>> changed or removed ?)"
>> So if app X opens an ODT with tables and X doesn't support tables, that
>> would be OK as long as X isn't removing the tables when saving the
>> document to a file.
>
>
> Part of the ODF namespace as per the spec (whichever spec that is),
> I'd suggest. As I've noted before here, random third-party extension
> preservation has led to interoperability disasters in the past with
> ISO specs.

Maybe the solution here is it say something such as:

1 "Third-party extensions shall be in a separate namespace."

2 "Conforming applications which encounter a node in an unexpected
namespace while importing an ODF file shall check for a single
immediate child node of the node in an expected namespace and, if the
immediate child is present replace the node in an unexpected namespace
with it's child in an expected namespace. If the node in an unexpected
namespace has no immediate child in an expected namespace or has
several children in expected namespaces, the node in an unexpected
namespace shall be ignored in it's entirety."

The aim is to allow ODF to contain customisations along with defaults
and specify exactly when and how the defaults should be used.

cheers
stuart