Re: [office-formula] Goals/levels/packaging/complex numbers

[Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera@zmsl.com>]

robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
>> Just to make sure I understand your proposal. You suggest that
 >> a PDA can be called ODF compliant even if it is not able to
 >> support all the formulas specified in the ODF formula spec?
[snip]
> 
> Keep in mind that no one has defined "compliance" for ODF, at the TC 
> level or otherwise.  This is an open question.  So this is my opinion 
> only.  I'm proposing a rather minimal conformance criterion, one that 
> acknowledges that we're defining a markup language for documents, but 
> we're not defining a specification for spreadsheet applications.  Not 
> everything that operates on ODF documents is an editor or even needs to 
> be aware of formulas.  For example, a program might just be a standalone 
> convertor of ODF to PDF format.  Is it only ODF-compliant if it 
> implements a particular level of formulas?  The question doesn't even 
> make sense, because this program doesn't even need to know about 
> formulas.  But still it should be able to call itself ODF-compliant.

You're convincing me. The more I think about it the more I see it your 
way. I'll add a few examples:

* AbiWord couldn't be ODF-compliant if we required formulas.
* Gnumeric couldn't be ODF-compliant if we required word-processing 
features.
* A wiki couldn't be ODF-compliant if we required anything that a wiki 
can't do.


So, for ODF as a whole, it makes sense to say that an application 
doesn't have to support all the ODF features to be compliant. It just 
has to use ODF correctly for the features it /does/ support. And I guess 
it makes sense to do the same thing for the formula component of ODF.


> I'm not sure there is such thing as ODF-compliance for an application 
> which merely reads ODF other than accepting all valid ODF documents and 
> degrading gracefully if reference is made of an unimplemented feature.

So, ODF viewers and ODF import filters can't be "compliant"?


Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
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