+1 in general, though I agree that your proposal might need some
re-wording (and please take that as being non-critical. I hear what
you're saying but simply found one sentence to be worded in a
slightly confused way).
Craig
Tyche
Ben Baston wrote:
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:02 PM, Radoslav Dejanoviæ <>
wrote:
Gordon MacGinitie wrote:
> I urge that the forwarding of unknown features be considered a
violation
> of interoperability.
That is a pretty smart method of niping it in the bud. If there isn't
a
serious reason to preserve unknown features, I vote for this
"violation
act"
What is described is an historic and well-known method of vendor
lock-in, i.e. including undocumented features unavailable from
otherwise conformal competitors. The point made is to forbid this
behavior. Obviously, this behavior is at the heart of
non-interoperability between office suite applications today. We
would do well to formally address the problem, don't you think?
I suggest that this group's charter should endorse this concept
[forwarding of undocumented and thus unknown features] as a guiding
principal for interoperability. May I suggest that our OIIC TC
Charter should state something like [wordsmiths definitely
encouraged]
Inclusion of an unknown feature breaks
interoperability and therefore, if such features are inserted into an
ODF document, the result is no longer an ODFdocument. Thus such
behavior should [issue a warning to the user | not be done | be
flagged as fail | be considered as non-interoperable behavior].
An unknown feature is defined as any content placed into an ODF
document by any method without first providing or making
known a public and also an unrestricted [able to be used by all
without royalty or use restriction] and operable implementation of
the method used being publicly and widely available to all users and
implementors of ODF.
If this is not part of the ODF standard now [which I suspect but do
not know to be the case], then this interoperability concept
should be a suggestion for revision to the appropriate TC IMHO.
Otherwise we may indeed see lock-in history repeated and any efforts
thwarted.
--
Ben Baston ComputerPro "Serving Computer Users since 1988"
Computers+Security+Networks+Training+Consulting+Repair+
Linux+Windows+Palm+Database+Websites+Software+Recovery
