"Ben Baston" <> wrote
on 06/30/2008 05:51:51 PM:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:02 PM, Radoslav Dejanoviæ <
> > wrote:
> 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'm aware of this behavior in the past. In fact
through the 1980's and 1990's almost all word processors relied on document
formats that were proprietary and mostly undocumented. However, I
am not aware of this being a problem with ODF applications today. Maybe
someone can point me to an example of where this is a problem?
> 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.
>
We are writing a TC charter, not a manifesto. OASIS
defines the specific questions we must answer in a charter, and they are
explicit in their rules that we answer these questions and add no other
information. See: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php#formation
But I certainly agree that the detection of such undocumented
extensions can and should be something we flag. In fact, I see that
Sun has recently put online a new "ODF Validator" that has a
"strict" mode that will report any such extensions: http://tools.services.openoffice.org/odfvalidator/
> 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.
>
The ODF standard is currently being revised to ODF
1.2. I'd encourage any feedback of this nature to be submitted to
the ODF TC (which I co-chair) here: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=office
We can have a fuller discussion on ODF's treatment
of extensions there. Further discussion of this on the oiic-formation-discuss
list is off-topic, since the proposed OIIC TC cannot change the ODF standard.
Regards,
-Rob
