Re: [opendocument-users] simple OO.org document goes awry in MS Office2007 w/SP2 - what went wrong?

[Michael Stahl <Michael.Stahl@Sun.COM>]

hi Paul,

marbux wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 4:47 AM, Michael Stahl<Michael.Stahl@sun.com> wrote:
>> hi Paul,
>>
>> marbux wrote:
>>> If we are to lend credence to both the earlier and later
>>> statements, one might infer that KDE and Sun worked out their interop
>>> issues at the application level but didn't go to the trouble of
>>> submitting corresponding proposals to fix the spec so others could
>>> benefit from the knowledge they gained through their collaboration.
>> this claim is demonstrably false.
>> see e.g. "Proposal to enhance and clarify lists" by David Faure, Thomas
>> Zander and Oliver-Rainer Wittmann:
>> http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/23418/07-04-05-proposal-lists.odt
> 
> Sorry, Michael, but you're wrong. I remember the "List Enhancement
> Proposal" well because it was hugely controversial on the TC. It only
> affects a few edge cases on ordered lists, or at least that's what
> Michael Brauer said. He also admitted that it was a trade-off between
> features and compatibility, with compatibility the loser.

my point was that there is an instance of a ODF proposal with authors from 
both the KDE and OOo projects, falsifying your claim above that such 
proposals do not exist.

> The problem was that because of an ambiguity in the spec, KWord had
> implemented ordered lists differently from OOWriter. The amazing fix
> that Sun and KDE came up with was to allow implementations the choice
> between using list tuples or list triples. This was so KDE wouldn't
> have to write a converter for their ODF 1.0-1.1 documents.

not true: the 2 ways of representing lists (list/list-item and 
numbered-paragraph) were already in ODF 1.0

> But it was anything but an interoperability fix. Consider that we'll
> now have some apps apps out there expecting list triples and others
> expecting list tuples. Now think about a processing chain where the
> next app to process the document is unpredictable. One can map list
> tuples to list triples, but going the other direction doesn't work so
> well.

given that both representations are valid ODF 1.0, this is not exactly a 
new problem.

> So we got a work-around to avoid KDE having to write a converter for
> its legacy documents, a break in compatibility with ODF 1.0/1.1, and a
> break in compatibility between ODF apps and MS Word, which does list
> tuples. That wasn't exactly good news to the Foundation developers who
> were developing ODF plug-ins for MS Office that could round trip
> between the Microsoft legacy formats and ODF without data loss.
> 
> Short story: That was not an interop fix and it says more about the
> ODF TC's indifference to interoperability than anything else.

huh? personally, i had no problem implementing numbered-paragraph import 
in OOo, given the clarifications in the proposal which made the job a lot 
easier.

> Best regards,
> 
> Paul

regards,
michael

-- 
Michael Stahl            mailto:michael.stahl@sun.com
http://www.sun.de        OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Writer
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