[libreoffice-users] Re: Clarification about ODF Extended

Tanstaafl wrote
> On 3/20/2014 5:28 PM, e-letter <

> inpost@

> > wrote:
> > Thank you. It is a worry that 17 out of 24 "features" are in fact
> > devoted to "interoperability" with m$.
>
> Nope, not a worry at all. Compatibility with the office product that holds
> the vast majority of the market share is a decent objective.

In fact, there is even an ODF / OOXML Translation Guidelines standard
(ISO/IEC TR 29166) to further clarify the issue. This is another standard
that also may need updating once the final less-clear parts of OOXML are
worked out by ISO/IEC JTC 1, SC 34.

General comment:
While this thread appears to have taken on a life of its own with respect to
"compliance" and "validation" (which are not the same) the comment by T.
Behrens in  bug fdo#30711
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30711#c3>   is worth reading.
Of particular interest is the reference to "ODF-Next". This is an expression
used to generally refer to the version of the standard that is under
development (but never actually arrives, it rolls over). The term is widely
used within OASIS. In standards terms it is a mirroring of the train
development model used by LO i.e., a past, present, and future version at
any one time.

This is what I meant up-thread when I stated that ODF development "needs to
be practical (based on real-world use cases) and community-driven" i.e.,
adapted to cater for unforseen use cases by people who are creating
documents or even matters that were not thought of in the original
spcification. Even so, I can understand the concern that ODF v1.2 Extended
is not an ISO/IEC standard. I guess all that can be said by way of
reassurance is to re-iterate what Italo and Mark Bourne have each indicated:
the extra bits will not affect either validation or compatibility as they
will be ignored.


TomD wrote
> How about trying to get involved with OASIS to see if any of the critical
> assumptions have any basis in reality?

Thanks for bringing this up. All these standards organisations, including
ISO/IEC and OASIS, rely on volunteered time. There is a mis-conception that
because the voting rights list reads like the Fortune 500 that hundreds of
paid professionals are tirelessly working away. That is really only part of
the story. As with any free / open source / community venture issues are
often left to languish unless someone takes an interest. I recently enquired
of OASIS whether a proposal for a new chart type (box plot) had moved along,
as there was little detail in the related OASIS issue. The response was an
invitation to become more involved by writing up the required technical
proposal, which is exactly as it should be. I am still hopeful I can.

Best wishes, Owen.



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