Re: [office-comment] Committee Draft 01 of ODF 1.2: Formula specificationmissing (change of modal verb and conformance requirement)

Jesper Lund Stocholm <> wrote on 02/23/2009 08:28:42 
AM:

> 
> As you put it yourself, "using stuff outside of the spec is a nuclear
> death ray to interop" (my paraphrasing of your words).
> 

I knew that phrase would come back to haunt me some day...  The point is 
not that nuclear death ray's are intrinsically and always bad, but that 
they are over-kill for most tasks.  Most often a far more modest tool will 
solve the problem more elegantly and with fewer risks of an adverse 
outcome.  You can slice a loaf of bread with a knife, or with a chainsaw. 
Both will work.  But you are unlikely to lose a leg if you make an error 
with a bread knife. 

Same thing with extensions to ODF.  I acknowledge that extensions have a 
role to play, but we need to craft them in a way which they can solve 
problems and be safe in the context of editable office documents, which 
intrinsically must deal with versioning, embedded code, metadata, digital 
signatures, copy/paste semantics of document data, within and between 
documents, round-trip editing, etc.  Simply saying, "add extensions 
wherever you like" is bad engineering since it does not solve the real 
problem of extensibility.  It simply provides a nuclear death ray gun and 
tells the implementor (and the users) "Be careful with that, guys".  I 
think we ought to do more than that.

-Rob