From owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org Thu Jun 21 12:13:37 2007 Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:12:28 -0700 (PDT) From: jon.bosak@sun.com Subject: INCITS-V1: Scope-Durusau-11 Sender: owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org To: incits-v1@incits-v1.org Reply-to: incits-v1@incits-v1.org X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-Authentication-warning: jurassic-x4600.sfbay.sun.com: bosak set sender to jon.bosak@sun.com using -f (For the text of the comment in question, see http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/v1mail/200705/2007May23-170209.eml) The Scope statement (Part 1, Section 1) of DIS 29500 reads, in its entirety, as follows: This Standard defines Office Open XML's vocabularies and document representation and packaging. It also specifies requirements for consumers and producers of Office Open XML. Patrick's comment: It has taken a lot of reading of OpenXML and working with the documents provided by Ecma to realize that there is no document model offered by DIS 29500 in the sense that the term is understood in the XML community. What DIS 29500 does define is an XML syntax representation of a legacy binary format and at least partially defines optional semantics for that representation. The consumers and producers described in DIS 29500 are consumers and producers of a legacy binary format represented in XML syntax. If that is truly the case, then the scope statement of DIS 29500 should clearly reflect that it is defining an XML syntax representation of one or more legacy formats and not a general XML document model for office documents. I don't see any reason (on the face of it) why DIS 29500 could not *both* define "an XML syntax representation of one or more legacy formats" and also provide "a general XML document model for office documents." I take Patrick's point here to be that the former is stated directly and in some detail to be the purpose of OOXML in just about everything that's been written to justify its existence, in particular in the Ecma document titled "Office Open XML Overview" (Ecma TC45/2006/374) that accompanied DIS 29500 to introduce it for our consideration; that the latter is what would be mistakenly assumed as part of the purpose of OOXML by anyone who had not studied DIS 29500 as carefully as Patrick has; and that a proper statement of scope would explicitly recognize the purpose of OOXML and would correct the natural misapprehension of the phrase "document representation" as referring to a document model that is not, in fact, described in DIS 29500. I agree. In crafting an appropriate statement of scope for DIS 29500, we probably can't do better than starting with Ecma TC45/2006/374, which was produced by the committee responsible for Ecma 376 specifically to explain their intent in creating OOXML. It says: OpenXML was designed from the start to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corporation. The standardization process consisted of mirroring in XML the capabilities required to represent the existing corpus, extending them, providing detailed documentation, and enabling interoperability. Combining the language of Ecma TC45/2006/374 with Patrick's suggestions yields this candidate replacement for the current statement of scope: This Standard defines an XML vocabulary designed to faithfully represent the corpus of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corporation. It associates information items denoted by the vocabulary with document formatting semantics and other legacy binary features and provides methods for creating relationships among files governing those features. The Standard also defines packaging conventions for Office Open XML and specifies requirements for consumers and producers of Office Open XML. Doug Mahugh's 17 May reponse to the original posting of Durusau-11 acknowledges that "the statement 'the purpose of DIS 29500 is to provide an XML representation of Microsoft Office 97-2003 binary formats' is correct" but says that this characterization is incomplete because it does not recognize that another purpose of DIS 29500 is to enable "integration options for external schemas." This does not contradict the need for DIS 29500 to explicitly recognize that "DIS 29500 is a representation in XML of a legacy binary format," it just adds (possibly) to the list of things that need to be clearly stated. Perhaps Doug can suggest further language on this to be included with the replacement scope statement above. Doug's admission in his message of 18 May that the statement "to the best of our knowledge, it [OOXML] is the only XML document format that supports every feature in the binary formats" in Ecma TC45/2006/374 "sounds like marketing fluff" is interesting, to say the least, but the fact is that the representation of legacy binary formats is explicitly the reason that we and everyone else in the world have been given as the primary reason for spending our time on this. That primary reason has to be reflected in the statement of scope. Jon