Subject: INCITS-V1: Scope-Durusau-11

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:12:28 -0700 (PDT)

(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