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Subject: Questioning Portabilty Assertions
I have been looking at more places where Portability statements are made and I want to challenge their being there at all. It is my impression that there is no testable conformance target that can be specified for *Portable* OpenDocument Formulas. The reason is that it involves the behavior, and the intentions, of a player that is not recognized as a participant against which testable conformance can be asserted. We have no OpenDocumentFormula producer target, and we have no way of characterizing the degree to which what is produced is guided by a human end-user to assure that their purposes would be satisfied across implementations (especially since there is no standalone implementation of OpenFormula except as a calculator, although that is an interesting case). It seems clear to me that the specification of OpenFormula needs to be sufficiently complete that someone with a portability concern could discover practices that MAY improve portability with regard to a targeted OpenFormula-hosting (e.g., in ODF 1.2 conforming spreadsheet documents). The degree of successful portability will depend very much on the degree to which implemented consumers and producers of the OpenFormula-hosting specification are reliable (and transparent) with respect to a particular portability-seeking practice. While I think that portability in a given context is a wonderful achievement, this strikes me as something far closer to the best practices for document authors and guidance for practice-encouraging implementations that Rob Weir has raised on the ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC. I don't believe there is anything that can be meaningfully said about a kind of portability that is independent of OpenFormula-hosting specifications and the conditions for their conforming implementations *combined* with whatever the state of support for portability-seeking users is *other* *than* what we already should be saying about what a compliant OpenFormula targets are and what the clearly-defined semantics are. For working purposes, I think we should move portability statements into working-document notes so that the thinking and the objective behind such statements is not lost in our work. We should be looking at what can be said about what is specified and the qualify of the specified behavior that is required to ensure that the safe areas for usage are discernable in the context of a specified OpenFormula hosting. Then we can remove them or provide them in a Committee Note and/or encourage the OIC TC to give this priority attention. - Dennis Dennis E. Hamilton ------------------ NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability mailto:Dennis.Hamilton@acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 http://NuovoDoc.com http://ODMA.info/dev/ http://nfoWorks.org -----Original Message----- From: Eike Rathke [mailto:erack@sun.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 05:45 To: office-formula@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [office-formula] Groups -OpenDocument-part2-draft18-editor-revision(OpenDocument-part2-draft18-edito r-revision.odt) uploaded Hi Patrick, On Monday, 2010-02-01 13:50:04 -0500, Patrick Durusau wrote: > We still need to decide what to do with the portable language. > > One option would be to move it to a normative annex that treats > instances of syntax. The no revision of the portable language speaking > of documents would be necessary. I think moving the portable document text away to a separated annex wouldn't be good. It is much easier to understand if it is kept within context. Earlier we agreed to convert portable documents language to portability notes, and in a second step turn parts of those notes to normative text where necessary. [ ... ]
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