RE: [opendocument-users] simple OO.org document goes awry in MS Office 2007 w/SP2 - what went wrong?

["Alex Brown" <alexb@griffinbrown.co.uk>]

Svante hi

> Certainly there is no 'favouring' of any particular implementation in 
> the validator of odftoolkit.org, otherwise it would be a bug of the 
> validator.
> The fault you are mentioning is not a validity fault (see 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-doctype),

I didn't describe it as a "validity fault". It is more fundamental than
that.

> but a dead link, which is
> 'confusing' the underlying/wrapped Multi Schema Validator and would 
> block the complete validation by looking for a non provided DTD.

I don't think it "confuses" msv, but causes a problem deeper in the
stack as the XML parser can't resolve the reference. This is an area
where the XML recommendation is reticent, but Tim Bray's annotation
version states: "If you do something silly like try using an empty
identifier, or one that doesn't work, anyone to whom you send the
document has every right to complain that it's broken."

But whatever the in and outs of the fault, there is no doubt that the
odftoolkit.org has code specifically to work around this issue by
detecting the string "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD Manifest 1.0//EN" and then
resolving this reference to an empty string.

The other thing I mentioned (namespace adaptation) is another clear case
of the validator favouring OpenOffice.org. If the user submits a certain
type file, produced by OO.o, which is *not* valid against an ODF schema,
the code will detect the namespace
"http://openoffice.org/2001/manifest"; and modify the instance so that
the correct namespace is used instead. The user is informed that their
submitted file *is* valid, when in fact it is not.

There are other instances of this in the code. So far as I can see, they
are all addressed to faults in documents emitted by OO.o
implementations.

> The
> problem of the missing reference (not an ODT issue) is further not 
> concealed, but given out by the validator when choosing the logging 
> level 'all'.

I don't think anybody has said it is concealed.

But it's not prominent.

I do think this validator might easily mislead a casual user who
submitted a (technically faulty) ODF document and was told by the
validator that it was fault-free.
 
> I am happy to see that more validators step into the scene, esp. with 
> different approaches as yours using Schematron, which gives ODF higher

> reliability and users a choice.

Thanks - I'm not (yet) though using Schematron (it's just jing-based at
the moment) - I'm going to need some bigger hardware to run a public
Schematron validation service for ODF documents, as it'll need to build
a load of in-memory trees.

- Alex.