Thomas,
Comments below:
Thomas Zander wrote:
>On Monday 16 April 2007 09:44, Florian Reuter wrote:
>
>
>>Oliver is not very precise here. A better statement would be
>><revised>
>>Thus, the same XML fragment will be interpreted differently in ODF 1.1
>>and ODF 1.2 with Proposal Two when Olivers' understand of ODF1.1 lists
>>is used. </revised>
>>However exactly this case is not specified by ODF1.1. Its also worth
>>mentioning that Olivers' understanding of ODF1.1 lists contradicts e.g.
>>with OOo's understanding of ODF1.1 lists.
>>
>>
>
>For a fact I know that what your proposal states means the way that
>KOffice does lists is completely wrong. In other words; your proposal
>would make documents created in koffice fail to comply.
>
>And may I say that I if someone employed by Sun and working on lists
>states that the current way of using lists is X and you are stating that
>to not be true. Then without looking at the tiny details; I'm certainly
>inclined to believe the technician that works on the code.
>
>Anyway; I read the both proposals and the comparison;
>my comparison would be really really simple:
>
> Propsal by Florian changes behavior incompatible with existing
>behavior, proposal by me/Oliver writes down the existing behavior and
>expands on that.
>
>
>
The question is whether standards should 'bless' current behavior or do
standards establish what the 'correct' behavior should be. The dividing
line is rarely clear because standards exist in tension with
implementations, save for the rare cases where standards precede all
implementations.
Being something of a professional standards person, I tend towards
standards establishing 'correct' behavior so that the process is not
trapped by the particular implementation choices. Some people with
equally long if not longer experience in the standards process do take
the opposite position.
>Is there anything more that is relevant?
>
>
Sure, what should the behavior be?
If some implementation has made choices that are contrary or
inconsistent with the eventual standard, then that implementation has to
change to be consistent with the standard. I am very reluctant to accept
the position that standards should be adapted to meet the choices of a
particular implementation. Particularly if that will lead to different
ways to model the same behavior, which will lead to a lack of
interoperability, the very thing that standards are written to promote
(well, one of the goals of standards).
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
