On Thursday 23 August 2007 20:04, Nagarjuna G. wrote: > India votes against ooxml unanimously. the decision of the
"The goal of Open XML is to have compatibility with the existing base of Office documents. In the cases such as this, it uses capabilities to best enable interoperability between implementing applications. The syntax for identifying these properties are fully specified in the standard, which provides for better interoperability than if they had been left out. As these represent legacy behavior though, the TC decided that it was not valuable to fully specify how an implementer would actually mimic this behavior, and the use of these settings are completely optional. If an application already knows how this behavior is implemented, then the spec gives them guidance on how to read and write that setting. If they do not understand the behavior though, they can just ignore the setting." The above is an oft repeated argument in the reply to .comments. From the statement I understand that in order to convert old documents (MSOffice <2007 ) one needs to refer to some other MS documentation, which are not part of the standard (and by implication not unencumbered). Also only applications which already understand these legacy docs are capable of accurately mimicing the presentation. Therefore it is not possible to write a converter to convert a legacy doc to OOXML or anything else. What M$ is saying is a typical two faced M$ speak - to other non M$ vendors pay us for the legacy specs so that you can covert legacy docs to something useable and to the customer pay us for M$2007 and you can use your old docs and interoperate. One of the most important requirements would be to reuse and interoperate with old documents, which M$ says is not important/ unneccessary / need not be addressed etc. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
