RE: [office] Action required: OpenDocument v1.0 Second EditionDraft 28 (revised)

Rob 
says:

If we do this, I'd like us to also write up and adopt a formal 
deprecation policy for the TC -- what does it mean, how is it decided, is 
support ever removed entirely, etc.  Deprecation is a powerful thing and 
useful for maintaining the health of the specification.  But like forest 
fires, we need to consider carefully how and when we use them. 

As 
Patrick knows, I'm very cautious about things that impact backwards 
compatibility. It's necessary, particularly when you have a new standard, and 
you know there might be bugs in it, not to break things for early adopters. But 
our experience with SGML was that backwards compatibility became a stumbling 
block to updates, so that the developers of XML picked up and moved to the W3C 
rather than stay in ISO and constantly run into a brick wall. (Of course some of 
them then moved from the W3C to OASIS and then brought their work back to ISO in 
the case of RELAX NG.) 

 

I've 
argued in favor of backwards compatibility to XTM 1.0 in XTM 2.0, but I don't 
think I'd argue for such things in SGML any more (I just sent Patrick the source 
of an ISO Technical Report that was marked up in GML, and I don't think anybody 
would argue in favor of supporting some of the constructs there 
today).

 

Jim 
Mason