Re: [xml-dev] NY Times reference to 'secret coding'

[Melvin Chin <mc@SoftOffice.Net>]

At 03:45 PM 2007-09-04 -0700, Ken North wrote:
>...
>Are there any documents that can shed some light one this - which parts of 
>the
>OOXML spec rely on 'secret coding' ?
>...

Groklaw's site has many listed.  I've browsed through Part-4 and found the 
same.

Mostly got to do with references to Word95, Word6.0, Word6.x, Word97, etc.
Specification of the nature of "autoSpaceLikeWord95" with the "specification"
described with "Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing".  So implementer
has to figure out what is proper emulation of Word 95, and so on.

Most likely countries' objection comments would include either suggestion to
remove these references, which would mean derailing the objective of backward
compatibility with older versions of Word documents, or revealing more 
precisely
and in non-ambiguous terms like "emulate the behavior of".  The latter means
revealing "secret coding".

While the objectives of OOXML may be good (to both the proponent and other
end users), the editor really needs to do a better job than using ambiguous 
words
like "emulate", "behavior", etc that do not belong to a quality international
standard proposal.



cheers.
Melvin Chin